Graham Greene Collected Essay

GRAHAM GREENE:

COLLECTED ESSAYS

OTHER BOOKS BY

GRAHAM GREENE

NOVELS
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
England Made Me
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The End of the Affair
The Quiet American
A Burnt-Out Case
The Comedians

SHORT STORIES
Twenty-One Stories
A Sense of Reality

May We Borrow Your Husband? & other
Comedies of the Sexual Life

ENTERTAINMENTS
Stamboul Train
A Gun for Sale
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Third Man and The Fallen Idol
Loser Takes All
Our Man in Havana

TRAVEL

Journey Without Maps
The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character

PLAYS

The Living Room
The Potting Shed
The Complaisant Lover
Carving a Statue

Graham Greene

Collected Essay

THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON SYDNEY
TORONTO

© Graham Greene 1969
SBN 370 OO34O 3

Printed and bound in Great Britain for
The Bodley Head Ltd
9 Bow Street, wcz

by William Clowes & Sons Ltd, Beccles
Set in Monotype Plantin Light
First Published 1969

CONTENTS

Author's Note, 9
Acknowledgments, 10

PART I : PERSONAL PROLOGUE
The Lost Childhood, 13

PART II : NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

[1]

Henry James : The Private Universe, 23

Henry James: The Religious Aspect, 41

The Portrait of a Lady, 54

The Plays of Henry James, 62

The Dark Backward, 69

Two Friends, 75

From Feathers to Iron, 79

[2]

Fielding and Sterne, 83
Servants of the Novel, 95
Romance in Pimlico, 98
The Young Dickens, 101
Hans Andersen, in

[33

Francois Mauriac, 1 1 5
Bemanos, the Beginner, 122
The Burden of Childhood, 127
Man Made Angry, 132

5

CONTENTS

G. K. Chesterton, 135

Walter de la Mare’s Short Stories, 141

The Saratoga Trunk, 149

Arabia Deserta, 153

The Poker-Face, 156

Ford Madox Ford, 159

Frederick Rolfe: Edwardian Inferno, 172

Frederick Rolfe: From the Devil’s Side, 176

Frederick Rolfe: A Spoiled Priest, 179

Remembering Mr Jones, 182

The Domestic Background, 185

The Public Life, 188

Goats and Incense, 19 1

Notes on Somerset Maugham, 197

The Town of Malgudi, 206

Rider Haggard’s Secret, 209

Journey Into Success, 215

Isis Idol, 220

The Last Buchan, 223

Edgar Wallace, 226

Beatrix Potter, 232

Harkaway’s Oxford, 241

PART III: SOME CHARACTERS

[I]

Poetry from Limbo, 249
An Unheroic Dramatist, 253
Doctor Oates of Salamanca, 257
Anthony A Wood, 260

6

CONTENTS

John Evelyn, 263
Background for Heroes, 268
A Hoax on Mr Hulton, 271
A Jacobite Poet, 27 6
Charles Churchill, 280
The Lover of Leeds, 284
Inside Oxford, 289

[2]

George Darley, 292

The Apostles Intervene, 307

Mr Cook’s Century, 312

The Explorers, 316

* Sore Bones : Much Headache ’, 322

Francis Parkman, 329

Don in Mexico, 337

[ 3 1

Samuel Butler, 340
The Ugly Act, 343
Eric Gill, 347
Herbert Read, 351
The Conservative, 359
Norman Douglas, 362
Invincible Ignorance, 366
The Victor and the Victim, 369
Simone Weil, 372
Three Priests:

1. The Oxford Chaplain, 376

2. The Paradox of a Pope, 380

3. Eighty Years on the Barrack Square, 397

7

CONTENTS

Three Revolutionaries :

1. The Man Pure as Lucifer, 402

2. The Marxist Heretic, 405

3. The Spy, 414

[ 4 ]

Portrait of a Maiden Lady, 420
Film Lunch, 423
The Unknown War, 427
Great Dog of Weimar, 432
The British Pig, 437
George Moore and Others, 442
At Home, 447

PART IV: PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT
The Soupsweet Land, 455

8

Author’s Note

In selecting what essays to reprint over a period of more
than thirty years I have made it a principle to include
nothing of which I can say that, if I were writing today,
I would write in a different sense. The principle applies
as much to my hatreds as to my loves. Some of these
attacks, reprinted after so many years, are directed at
what might seem now rather diminished objects, but I
would feel a serious lack in the book if they were omitted.
A man should be judged by his enmities as well as by his
friendships.

9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments are due to the following
publishers for permission to reprint essays con-
tained in this volume:

Chatto & Windus for c Henry James : The Private
Universe’; Elkin Matthews for ‘Henry James : The
Religious Aspect 5 ; Oxford University Press for the
introduction to The Portrait of a Lady ; Hamish
Hamilton for ‘The Young Dickens 5 and for ‘Edgar
Wallace 5 ; Cassells for ‘Fielding and Sterne 5 ; The
Bodley Head for ‘The Burden of Childhood 5 ;
Faber & Faber for ‘Walter de la Mare’s Short
Stories 5 ; Librairie Plon for ‘ Bernanos, the Begin-
ner 5 ; Methuen for ‘The Town of Malgudi 5 ;
Heinemann for ‘ Norman Douglas 5 ; and McGibbon
& Kee for ‘The Spy 5 .

Acknowledgments are also made to editors of
the following periodicals:

New Statesman , Spectator , Time & Tide , The
London Mercury, Night and Day , France Libre ,
Horizon , The Month , The Tablet , The Listener ,
The Observer , The Sunday Times, London Magazine,
Life and The Daily Telegraph Magazine „

io

PART I

Personal Prologue

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any
deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we
are entertained, we may modify some views we already
hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a
confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love
affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatter-
ingly back.

But in childhood all books are books, of divination, tell-
ing us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who
sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they
influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited
us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading
to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first
fourteen years ? Of course I should be interested to hear
that a new novel by Mr E. M. Forster was going to appear
this spring, but I could never compare that mild ex-
pectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat,
the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a
novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain
Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read be-
fore. No, it is in those early years that I would look for the
crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its
journey towards death.

I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key
turned in a lock and I found I could read — not just the
sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled
like railway carriages, but a real book. It was paper-
covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged,
dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the water
rising above his waist — an adventure of Dixon Brett,
detective. All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as
I believed : I did not want anybody to know that I could

13

PERSONAL PROLOGUE

read. I suppose I half consciously realized even then that
this was the dangerous moment. I was safe so long as I
could not read — the wheels had not begun to turn, but now
the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere wait-
ing for the child to choose — the life of a chartered account-
ant perhaps, a colonial civil servant, a planter in China, a
steady job in a bank, happiness and misery, eventually
one particular form of death, for surely we choose our
death much as we choose our job. It grows out of our acts
and our evasions, out of our fears and out of our moments
of courage. I suppose my mother must have discovered
my secret, for on the journey home I was presented for
the train with another real book, a copy of Ballantyne’s
Coral Island with only a single picture to look at, a
coloured frontispiece. But I would admit nothing. All the
long journey I stared at the one picture and never opened
the book.

But there on the shelves at home (so many shelves for
we were a large family) the books waited — one book in
particular, but before I reach that one down let me take a
few others at random from the shelf. Each was a crystal
in which the child dreamed that he saw life moving. Here
in a cover stamped dramatically in several colours was
Captain Gilson’s The Pirate Aeroplane . I must have read
that book six times at least — the story of a lost civilization
in the Sahara and of a villainous Yankee pirate with an
aeroplane like a box kite and bombs the size of tennis balls
who held the golden city to ransom. It was saved by the
hero, a young subaltern who crept up to the pirate camp
to put the aeroplane out of action. He was captured and
watched his enemies dig his grave. He was to be shot at
dawn, and to pass the time and keep his mind from un-
comfortable thoughts the amiable Yankee pirate played

14

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

cards with him — the mild nursery game of Kuhn Kan.
The memory of that nocturnal game on the edge of life
haunted me for years, until I set it to rest at last in one of
my own novels with a game of poker played in remotely
similar circumstances.

And here is Sophy of Kravonia by Anthony Hope — the
story of a kitchen-maid who became a queen. One of the
first films I ever saw, about 1911, was made from that
book, and I can hear still the rumble of the Queen’s guns
crossing the high Kravonian pass beaten hollowly out on
a single piano. Then there was Stanley Weyman’s The
Story of Francis Cludde , and above all other books at that
time of my life King Solomon's Mines .

This book did not perhaps provide the crisis, but it
certainly influenced the future. If it had not been for that
romantic tale of Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis,
Captain Good, and, above all, the ancient witch Gagool,
would I at nineteen have studied the appointments list of
the Colonial Office and very nearly picked on the Nigerian
Navy for a career ? And later, when surely I ought to
have known better, the odd African fixation remained. In
1935 I found myself sick with fever on a camp bed in a
Liberian native’s hut with a candle going out in an empty
whisky bottle and a rat moving in the shadows. Wasn’t it
the incurable fascination of Gagool with her bare yellow
skull, the wrinkled scalp that moved and contracted like
the hood of a cobra, that led me to work all through 1942
in a little stuffy office in Freetown, Sierra Leone ? There
is not much in common between the land of the Kuku-
anas, behind the desert and the mountain range of Sheba’s
Breast, and a tin-roofed house on a bit of swamp where
the vultures moved like domestic turkeys and the pi-dogs
kept me awake on moonlit nights with their wailing.

15

PERSONAL PROLOGUE

and the white women yellowed by atebrin drove by to the
club; but the two belonged at any rate to the same con-
tinent, and, however distantly, to the same region of the
imagination — the region of uncertainty, of not knowing
the way about. Once I came a little nearer to Gagool and
her witch-hunters, one night in Zigita on the Liberian
side of the French Guinea border, when my servants sat
in their shuttered hut with their hands over their eyes and
someone beat a drum and a whole town stayed behind
closed doors while the big bush devil — whom it would
mean blindness to see — moved between the huts.

But King Solomon's Mines could not finally satisfy. It
was not the right answer. The key did not quite fit. Ga-
gool I could recognize — didn’t she wait for me in dreams
every night, in the passage by the linen cupboard, near the
nursery door ? and she continues to wait, when the mind
is sick or tired, though now she is dressed in the theolo-
gical garments of Despair and speaks in Spenser’s accents :

The longer life , I wote the greater sin ,

The greater sin , the greater punishment.

Yes, Gagool has remained a permanent part of the imag-
ination, but Quatermain and Curtis — weren’t they, even
when I was only ten years old, a little too good to be true ?
They were men of such unyielding integrity (they would
only admit to a fault in order to show how it might be
overcome) that the wavering personality of a child could
not rest for long against those monumental shoulders. A
child, after all, knows most of the game — it is only an
attitude to it that he lacks. He is quite well aware of
cowardice, shame, deception, disappointment. Sir Henry
Curtis perched upon a rock bleeding from a dozen

16

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

wounds but fighting on with the remnant of the Greys
against the hordes of Twala was too heroic. These men
were like Platonic ideas : they were not life as one had
already begun to know it.

But when — perhaps I was fourteen by that time — I
took Miss Majorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the
library shelf, the future for better or worse really struck.
From that moment I began to write. All the other possible
futures slid away: the potential civil servant, the don, the
clerk had to look for other incarnations. Imitation after
imitation of Miss Bowen’s magnificent novel went into
exercise-books — stories of sixteenth-century Italy or
twelfth-century England marked with enormous brutality
and a despairing romanticism. It was as if I had been
supplied once and for all with a subject.

Why ? On the surface The Viper of Milan is only the
story of a war between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of
Milan, and Mastino della Scala, Duke of Verona, told
with zest and cunning and an amazing pictorial sense.
Why did it creep in and colour and explain the terrible
living world of the stone stairs and the never quiet dormi-
tory ? It was no good in that real world to dream that one
would ever be a Sir Henry Curtis, but della Scala who at
last turned from an honesty that never paid and betrayed
his friends and died dishonoured and a failure even at
treachery — it was easier for a child to escape behind his
mask. As for Visconti, with his beauty, his patience, and
his genius for evil, I had watched him pass by many a
time in his black Sunday suit smelling of mothballs. His
name was Carter. He exercised terror from a distance like
a snowcloud over the young fields. Goodness has only
once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and
never will again, but evil can always find a home there.

2— C.E.G.G.

17

PERSONAL PROLOGUE

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
I read all that in The Viper of Milan and I looked round
and I saw that it was so.

There was another theme I found there. At the end of
The Viper of Milan — you will remember if you have once
read it — comes the great scene of complete success —
della Scala is dead, Ferrara, Verona, Novara, Mantua
have all fallen, the messengers pour in with news of fresh
victories, the whole world outside is cracking up, and
Visconti sits and jokes in the wine light. I was not on the
classical side or I would have discovered, I suppose, in
Greek literature instead of in Miss Bowen’s novel the
sense of doom that lies over success — the feeling that the
pendulum is about to swing. That too made sense; one
looked around and saw the doomed everywhere — the
champion runner who one day would sag over the tape;
the head of the school who would atone, poor devil,
during forty dreary undistinguished years; the scholar
. . . and when success began to touch oneself too, how-
ever mildly, one could only pray that failure would not be
held off for too long.

One had lived for fourteen years in a wild jungle
country without a map, but now the paths had been
traced and naturally one had to follow them. But I think
it was Miss Bowen’s apparent zest that made me want to
write. One could not read her without believing that to
write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had dis-
covered one’s mistake it was too late — the first book one
does enjoy. Anyway she had given me my pattern —
religion might later explain it to me in other terms, but
the pattern was already there — perfect evil walking the
world where perfect good can never walk again, and only
the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is

18

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

done. Man is never satisfied, and often I have wished
that my hand had not moved further than King Solomon's
Mines , and that the future I had taken down from the
nursery shelf had been a district office in Sierra Leone
and twelve tours of malarial duty and a finishing dose
of blackwater fever when the danger of retirement ap-
proached. What is the good of wishing ? The books are
always there, the moment of crisis waits, and now our
children in their turn are taking down the future and
opening the pages. In his poem c Germinal’ A.E. wrote:

In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed ,

The world's great sorrows were horn
And its heroes were made .

In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed .

1947

19

PART II

Novels and Novelists

[I]

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

The technical qualities of Henry James’s novels have
been so often and so satisfactorily explored* notably by
Mr Percy Lubbock, that perhaps I may be forgiven for
ignoring James as the fully conscious craftsman in order
to try to track the instinctive, the poetic writer back to the
source of his fantasies. In all writers there occurs a mo-
ment of crystallization when the dominant theme is plainly
expressed, when the private universe becomes visible
even to the least sensitive reader. Such a crystallization is
Hardy’s often-quoted phrase: ‘The President of the Im-
mortals . . . had ended his sport with Tess’, or that pas-
sage in his preface to Jude the Obscure , when he writes of
‘the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press
in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity’.
It is less easy to find such a crystallization in the works
of James, whose chief aim was always to dramatize, who
was more than usually careful to exclude the personal
statement, but I think we may take the sentence in the
scenario of The Ivory Tower , in which James speaks of
4 the black and merciless things that are behind great pos-
sessions’ as an expression of the ruling fantasy which drove
him to write: a sense of evil religious in its intensity.

4 Art itself’, Conrad wrote, ‘may be defined as a single-
minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to
the visible universe’, and no definition in his own pre-
faces better describes the object Henry James so passion-
ately pursued, if the word visible does not exclude the
private vision. If there are times when we feel, in The
Sacred Fount , even in the exquisite Golden Bowl , that the
judge is taking too much into consideration, that he could
have passed his sentence on less evidence, we have always

23

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

to admit, as the long record of human corruption unrolls,
that he has never allowed us to lose sight of the main case ;
and because his mind is bent on rendering even evil ‘the
highest kind of justice 5 , the symmetry of his thought
lends the whole body of his work the importance of a
system.

No writer has left a series of novels more of one moral
piece. The differences between James’s first works and
his last are only differences of art as Conrad defined it.
In his early work, perhaps, he rendered a little less than
the highest kind of justice ; the progress from The Ameri-
can to The Golden Bowl is a progress from a rather crude
and inexperienced symbolization of truth to truth itself:
a progress from evil represented rather obviously in terms
of murder to evil in propria persona , walking down Bond
Street, charming, cultured, sensitive — evil to be distin-
guished from good chiefly in the complete egotism of its
outlook. They are complete anarchists, these later
Jamesian characters, they form the immoral background
to that extraordinary period of haphazard violence which
anticipated the first world war : the attempt on Greenwich
Observatory, the siege of Sidney Street. They lent the
tone which made possible the cruder manifestations
presented by Conrad in The Secret Agent . Merton Den-
sher, who planned to marry the dying Milly Theale for
her money, plotting with his mistress who was her best
friend; Prince Amerigo, who betrayed his wife with her
friend, her father’s wife; Horton, who swindled his
friend Gray of his money: the last twist (it is always the
friend, the intimate who betrays) is given to these studies
of moral corruption. They represent an attitude which
had been James’s from very far back; they are not the
slow painful fruit of experience. The attitude never varied

24

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

from the time of The American onwards. Mme de
Bellegarde, who murdered her husband and sold her
daughter, is only the first crude presentation of a woman
gradually subtilized, by way of Mme Merle in The
Portrait of a Lady , into the incomparable figures of evil,
Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant.

This point is of importance. James has been too often
regarded as a novelist of superficial experience, as a
painter of social types, who was cut off by exile from the
deepest roots of experience (as if there were something
superior in the Sussex or Shropshire of the localized
talent to James’s international scene). But James was not
in that sense an exile; he could have dispensed with the
international scene as easily as he dispensed with all the
world of Wall Street finance. For the roots were not in
Venice, Paris, London; they were in himself. Densher,
the Prince, just as much as the redhaired valet Quint and
the adulterous governess, were rooted in his own charac-
ter. They were there when he wrote The American in
1876; all he needed afterwards to perfect his work to his
own impeccable standard was technical subtlety and that
other subtlety which comes from superficial observation,
the ability to construct convincing masks for his own
personality.

I do not use superficial in any disparaging sense. If his
practice-pieces, from The Europeans to The Tragic Muse ,
didn’t engage his full powers, and were certainly not the
vehicle for his most urgent fantasies, they were examples
of sharp observation, the fruits of a direct objective
experience, unsurpassed in their kind. He never again
proved himself capable of drawing a portrait so directly,
with such command of relevant detail. We know Char-
lotte Stant, of course, more thoroughly than we know

25

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians , but she emerges
gradually through that long book, we don’t ‘see’ her with
the immediacy that we see Miss Birdseye :

‘She was a little old lady with an enormous head; that
was the first thing Ransom noticed — the vast, fair, pro-
tuberant, candid, ungamished brow, surmounting a pair
of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes. . . . The long practice
of philanthropy had not given accent to her features ; it
had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. ... In
her large countenance her dim little smile scarcely
showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a kind of instal-
ment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she
would smile more if she had time, but that you could see,
without this, that she was gentle and easy to beguile. . . .
She looked as if she had spent her life on platforms, in
audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in seances;
in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly
lecture-lamps . 5

No writer’s apprentice- work contains so wide and bril-
liant a range of portraits from this very early Miss Birds-
eye to Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age :

‘Mrs Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still
charmingly pretty, and the nearest approach she made at
this moment to meeting her son’s description of her was
by looking beautifully desperate. She had about her the
pure light of youth — would always have it; her head, her
figure, her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely,
silly eyes, her natural, quavering tone, all played together
towards this effect by some trick that had never yet been
exposed. It was at the same time remarkable that — at
least in the bosom of her family — she rarely wore an

26

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present
juncture; she suggested for the most part the luxury, the
novelty of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the
cultivation of fine indifferencies. This was her special
sign — an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense effect
to her other resources. . . .’

The Awkzvard Age stands formidably between the two
halves of James’s achievement. It marks his decision to
develop finally from The American rather than from The
Europeans . It is the surrender of experience to fantasy. He
hadn’t found his method, but he had definitely found his
theme. One may regret, in some moods, that his more
superficial books had so few successors (English literature
has too little that is light, lucid, and witty), but one can-
not be surprised that he discarded many of them from
the collected edition while retaining so crude a fiction as
The American , discarded even the delicate, feline Wash-
ington Square , perhaps the only novel in which a man has
successfully invaded the feminine field and produced
work comparable to Jane Austen’s.

How could he have done otherwise if he was to be
faithful to his deeper personal fantasy ? He wrote of ‘poor
Flaubert’ that

* he stopped too short. He hovered for ever at the public
door, in the outer court, the splendour of which very
properly beguiled him, and in which he seems still to
stand as upright as a sentinel and as shapely as a statue.
But that immobility and even that erectness were paid
too dear. The shining arms were meant to carry further,
the outer doors were meant to open. He should at least
have listened at the chamber of the soul. This would have

27

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

floated him on a deeper tide; above all it would have
calmed his nerves/

His early novels, except The American , certainly be-
longed to the outer court. They had served their purpose,
he had improved his masks, he was never to be more
witty; but when he emerged from them again to take up
his main study of corruption in The Wings of the Dove he
had amazingly advanced: instead of murder, the more
agonizing mental violence; instead of Mme de Belle-
garde, Kate Croy; instead of the melodramatic heroine
Mme de Cintre, the deeply felt subjective study of Milly
Theale.

For to render the highest justice to corruption you
must retain your innocence: you have to be conscious all
the time within yourself of treachery to something valu-
able. If Peter Quint is to be rooted in you, so must the
child his ghost corrupts : if Osmond, Isabel Archer too.
These centres of innocence, these objects of treachery,
are nearly always women : the lovely daring Isabel Archer,
who goes out in her high-handed, wealthy way to meet
life and falls to Osmond; Nanda, the young girl £ coming
out’, who is hemmed in by a vicious social set; Milly
Theale, sick to death just at the time when life has most
to offer, surrendering to Merton Densher and Kate Croy
(apart from Quint and the Governess the most driven and
"damned’ of all James’s characters) ; Maggie Verver, the
unsophisticated ‘good’ young American who encounters
her particular corruption in the Prince and Charlotte
Stant; the child Maisie tossed about among grown-up
adulteries. These are the points of purity in the dark
picture.

The attitude of mind which dictated these situations
28

HENRY JAMES*. THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

was a permanent one. Henry James had a marvellous
facility for covering up his tracks (can we be blamed if we
assume he had a reason ?). In his magnificent prefaces he
describes the geneses of his stories, where they were
written, the method he adopted, the problems he faced:
he seems, like the conjurer with rolled sleeves, to show
everything. But you have to go further back than the
anecdote at the dinner-table to trace the origin of such
urgent fantasies. In this exploration his prefaces, even his
autobiographies, offer very little help. Certainly they give
his model for goodness; he is less careful to obliterate
that trail back into youth (if one can speak of care in con-
nexion with a design which was probably only half-con-
scious if it was conscious at all). His cousin, Mary
Temple, was the model, a model in her deadly sickness
and her high courage, above all in her hungry grip on
life, for Milly Theale in particular.

c She had [James wrote of her] beyond any equally
young creature I have known a sense for verity of charac-
ter and play of life in others, for their acting out of their
force or their weakness, whatever either might be, at no
matter what cost to herself. . . . Life claimed her and used
her and beset her — made her range in her groping: her
naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end
of the scale. . . . She was absolutely afraid of nothing she
might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough
wonder; and I think it is because one was to see her
launched on that adventure in such bedimmed, such al-
most tragically compromised conditions that one is caught
by her title to the heroic and pathetic mask/

Mary Temple then, whatever mask she wore, was al-
ways the point of purity, but again one must seek further

29

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

if one is to trace the source of James’s passionate distrust
in human nature, his sense of evil. Mary Temple was
experience, but that other sense, one feels, was bom in
him, was his inheritance.

It cannot but seem odd how little in his volumes of
reminiscence, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son
and Brother , Henry James really touches the subject of
his family. His style is at its most complex : the beauty of
the books is very like the beauty of Turner’s later pic-
tures: they are all air and light: you have to look a
long while into their glow before you discern the
most tenuous outline of their subjects. Certainly of the
two main figures, Henry James, Senior, and William
James, you learn nothing of what must have been to
them of painful importance: their sense of daemonic
possession.

James was to draw the figure of Peter Quint with his
little red whiskers and his white damned face, he was to
show Densher and Kate writhing in their hopeless in-
fernal sundering success; evil was overwhelmingly part
of his visible universe ; but the sense (we got no indication
of it in his reminiscences) was a family sense. He shared
it with his father and brother and sister. One may find
the dark source of his deepest fantasy concealed in a
family life which for sensitive boys must have been al-
most ideally free from compulsions, a tolerant cultured
life led between Concord and Geneva. For nearly two
years his father was intermittently attacked by a sense of
‘perfectly insane and abject terror’ (his own words); a
damned shape seemed to squat beside him raying out c a
fetid influence’. Henry James’s sister, Alice, was a prey
to suicidal tendencies, and William James suffered in
much the same way as his father.

30

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

T went one evening into a dressing-room in the twi-
light to procure some article that was there; when sud-
denly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it
came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the
image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the
asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely
idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or
rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up
against his chin, and the coarse grey undershirt, which
was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his
entire figure. . . . This image and my fear entered into a
species of combination with each other. That shape am /,
I felt potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me
against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as
it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and
such a perception of my own merely momentary dis-
crepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto
solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a
mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was
changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morn-
ing with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and
with a sense of the insecurity of life, that I never knew be-
fore. ... It gradually faded, but for months I was un-
able to go out into the dark alone . 5

This epileptic idiot, this urge towards death, the dam-
ned shape, are a more important background to Henry
James’s novels than Grosvenor House and late Victorian
society. It is true that the moral anarchy of the age gave
him his material, but he would not have treated it with
such intensity if it had not corresponded with his private
fantasy. They were materialists, his characters, but you

3i

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

cannot read far in Henry James’s novels without realizing
that their creator was not a materialist. If ever a man’s
imagination was clouded by the Pit, it was James’s. When
he touches this nerve, the fear of spiritual evil, he treats
the reader with less than his usual frankness : ‘a fairy-tale
pure and simple’, something seasonable for Christmas,
is a disingenuous description of The Turn of the Screw .
One cannot avoid a conviction that here he touched and
recoiled from an important inhibition.

To a biographer the early formative years of a writer
must always have a special fascination: the innocent eye
dwelling frankly on a new unexplored world, the vistas of
future experience at the end of the laurel walk, the voices
of older people, like “Viziers nodding together in some
Arabian night”, the strange accidents that seem to decide
not only that this child shall be a writer but what kind of
a writer this child shall be.

The eleven-year-old Conrad prepares his school work
in the big old Cracow house where his father, the patriot
Korzeniowski, lies dying:

‘There, in a large drawing room, panelled and bare,
with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of
light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a
little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of
my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a
tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it
would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze
herself through the crack, glide across the room, and
disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing
nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For, indeed, what
could they have had to say ? When they did speak to me
it was with their lips hardly moving, in a cloistral clear

32

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

whisper. Our domestic matters were ordered by the
elderly housekeeper of our emergency'. She, too, spoke
but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging
by a chain on her ample bosom. And though when she
spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never
let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note.
The air around me was all piety, resignation and silence.’

Stevenson is scared into Calvinism at three years old
by his nurse Cummy: T remember repeatedly awaking
from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of my
bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken,
my body convulsed with agony.’

The young James at thirteen finds himself ‘over-
whelmed and bewildered’ in the Galerie d’Apollon with
its frescoes by Lebrun and the great mythological paint-
ings of Delacroix:

T shall never forget how — speaking, that is, for my
own sense — they filled those vast halls with the influence
rather of some complicated sound, diffused and reverber-
ant, than of such visibilities as one could directly deal
with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and
coloured and confounding air, was difficult — it discour-
aged and defied; which was doubtless why my impression
originally best entertained was that of those magnificent
parts of the great gallery simply not inviting us to dis-
tinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their
endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in
perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung
circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening
into deep outward embrasures that threw off the rest of
monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of

3 — C.E.G.G*

33

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

wrought effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held
it there, at every point, as a vast bright gage, even at
moments a felt adventure, of experience . 5

It is impossible not to hear in such memories the open-
ing of the door : in some such moment of ‘ piety, resigna-
tion and silence 5 Conrad’s brooding note of sombre
dignity [and laconic heroism was first struck; the
Master of Ballantrae may have been buried alive in
Stevenson’s nightmare as years later in the Canadian
wastes, while the great wide air of glory and possessions and
4 bold ambiguity 5 was breathed into James like a holy ghost
at Pentecost in the great Paris gallery, where the spoils
of Poynton gathered round the schoolboy and Madame
Vionnet bloomed from the ceiling, a naked Venus.

It was just because the visible universe which he was
so careful to treat with the highest kind of justice was
determined for him at an early age that his family back-
ground is of such interest. There are two other odd gaps
in his autobiographies ; his two brothers, Wilky and Bob,
play in them an infinitesimal part. To Miss Burr, the
editor of Alice James’s Journal, we owe most of our know-
ledge of these almost commonplace, almost low-brow
members of a family intellectual even to excess. To
Wilky ‘the act of reading was inhuman and repugnant 5 ;
he wrote from his brigade, ‘Tell Harry that I am waiting
anxiously for his “next”. I can find a large sale for any
blood-and-thunder tale among the darks . 5 From his
brigade : that was the point. It was the two failures, Wilky
and Bob, who at eighteen and seventeen represented the
family on the battlefields of the Civil War. William’s eye-
sight was always bad, and Henry escaped because of an
accident, the exact nature of which has always remained

34

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

a mystery. One is glad, of course, that he escaped the
obvious effects of war: Wilky was ruined physically. Bob
nervously; both drifted in the manner of war-time heroes
from farming in Florida to petty business careers in
Milwaukee; and it is not improbable that the presence of
these ruined heroes helped to keep Henry James out of
America.

It is possible that through Wilky and Bob we can trace
the source of James’s main fantasy, the idea of treachery
which was always attached to his sense of evil. James had
not, so far as we know, been betrayed, like Monteith, like
Gray, like Milly Theale and Maggie Verver and Isabel
Archer, by his best friend, and it would have taken surely
a very deep betrayal to explain an impulse which dictated
The American in 1876 and The Golden Bowl in 1905,
which attached itself to the family sense of supernatural
evil and produced his great gallery of the damned. It
takes some form of self-betrayal to dip so deep, and one
need not go, like some modem critics, to a c castration
complex’ to find the reason. There are psychological
clues which point to James having evaded military service
with insufficient excuse. A civil war is not a continental
squabble; its motives are usually deeper, represent less
superficial beliefs on the part of the ordinary combatant,
and the James family at Concord were at the very spot
where the motives of the North sounded at their noblest.
His accident has an air of mystery about it (that is why
some of his critics have imagined a literal castration), and
one needs some explanation of his almost hysterical par-
ticipation in the Great War on the side of a civilization
about which he had no illusions, over whose corruption
he had swapped amusing anecdotes with Alice. It will be
remembered that in his magnificent study of treachery.

35

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

A Round of Visits , Monteith’s betrayer, like all the others,
was a very near friend. ‘ To live thus with his unremoved,
undestroyed, engaging, treacherous face, had been, as
our traveller desired, to live with all of the felt pang/ His
unremoved face, the felt pang: it is not hard to believe
that James suffered from a long subconscious uneasiness
about a personal failure.

This, then, was his visible universe : visible indeed if it
faced him daily in his glass : the treachery of friends, the
meanest kind of lies, 4 the black and merciless things as
he wrote in the scenario of The Ivory Tower , ‘that are
behind great possessions’. But it is perhaps the measure
of his greatness, of the wideness and justice of his view,
that critics of an older generation, Mr Desmond Mac-
Carthy among them, have seen him primarily as a
friendly, rather covetous follower of the ‘best’ society.
The sense of evil never obsessed him, as it obsessed
Dostoevsky; he never ceased to be primarily an artist,
unlike those driven geniuses, Lawrence and Tolstoy, and
he could always throw off from the superfluity of his
talent such exquisite amiable fragments as Daisy Miller
and The Pension Beaurepas : satire so gentle, even while
so witty, that it has the quality of nostalgia, a looking
back towards a way of life simple and unreflecting, with a
kind of innocence even in its greed. ‘Common she might
be,’ he wrote of Daisy Miller, ‘yet what provision was
made by that epithet for her queer little native grace.’ It
is in these diversions, these lovely little marginalia, that
the Marxist critic, just as much as Mr MacCarthy, finds
his material. He was a social critic only when he was not
a religious one. No writer was more conscious that he was
at the end of a period, at the end of the society he knew. It
was a revolution he quite explicitly foresaw; he spoke of

36

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

c the class, as I seemed to see it, that had had the longest
and happiest innings in history . . , and for whom the
future wasn’t going to be, by most signs, anything like so
bland and benedictory as the past ... I cannot say how
vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become — that
of the lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally
complete exposure of the immemorially protected.’

But the Marxists, just as much as the older critics, are
dwelling on the marginalia. Wealth may have been almost
invariably connected with the treacheries he described,
but so was passion. When he was floating on his fullest
tide, ‘ listening’ as he put it, "at the chamber of the soul’,
the evil of capitalist society is an altogether inadequate
explanation of his theme. It was not the desire for money
alone which united Densher and Kate, and the author of
The Spoils of Poynton would no more have condemned
passion than the author of The Ambassadors would have
condemned private wealth. His lot and his experience
happened to lie among the great possessions, but ‘the
black and merciless things’ were no more intrinsically
part of a capitalist than of a socialist system: they be-
longed to human nature. They amounted really to this:
an egotism so complete that you could believe that some-
thing inhuman, supernatural, was working there through
the poor devils it had chosen.

In The Jolly Corner Brydon, the cultured American
expatriate, returned to his New York home and found it
haunted. He hunted the ghost down. It was afraid of him
(the origin of that twist is known to us. In A Small Boy
James had described the childish dream he built his story
on). He drove it to bay in its evening dress under the sly-
light in the hall, discovered in the ‘evil, odious, blatant.

37

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

vulgar 5 features the reflection of himself. This is what he
would have been if he had stayed and joined the Wall
Street racket and prospered. It is easy to take the mere
social criticism implied, but I have yet to find socialist or
conservative who can feel any pity for the evil he denoun-
ces, and the final beauty of James 5 s stories lies in their
pity : ‘ The poetry is in the pity . 5 His egotists, poor souls,
are as pitiable as Lucifer. The woman Brydon loved had
also seen the ghost ; he had not appeared less blatant, less
vulgar to her with his ruined sight and maimed hand and
his million a year, but the emotion she chiefly felt was pity.

‘“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged , 55 she
said.

“And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I — you’ve
only to look at me! — ravaged?”

“Ah, I don’t say I like him better she granted after a
thought. “But he’s grim, he’s worn — and things have
happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with
your charming monocle .” 5

James wasn’t a prophet, he hadn’t a didactic purpose;
he wished only to render the highest kind of justice, and
you cannot render the highest kind of justice if you hate.
He was a realist : he had to show the triumphs of egotism ;
he was a realist: he had to show that a damned soul has
its chains. Milly Theale, Maggie Verver, these ‘good 5
people had their escapes, they were lucky in that they
loved, could sacrifice themselves like Wilky and Bob,
they were never quite alone on the bench of desolation.
But the egotists had no escape, there was no tenderness
in their passion, and their pursuit of money was often no
more than an interest, a hobby: they were, inescapably,

38

HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE

themselves. Kate and Merton Densher get the money for
which they’d schemed; they don’t get each other. Char-
lotte Stant and the Prince satisfy their passion at the ex-
pense of a lifetime of separation.

This is not 4 poetic justice’ ; it was not as a moralist that
James designed his stories, but as a realist. His family
background, his personal failure, determined his view of
the visible universe when he first began to write, and there
was nothing in the society of his time to make him recon-
sider his view. He had always been strictly just to the
truth as he saw it, and all that his deepening experience
had done for him was to alter a murder to an adultery,
but while in The American he had not pitied the murderer,
in The Golden Bowl he had certainly learned to pity the
adulterers. There was no victory for human beings, that
was his conclusion; you were punished in your own way,
whether you were of God’s or the Devil’s party. James
believed in the supernatural, but he saw evil as an equal
force with good. Humanity was cannon fodder in a war
too balanced ever to be concluded. If he had been guilty
himself of the supreme egotism of preserving his own
existence, he left the material, in his profound unsparing
analysis, for rendering even egotism the highest kind of
justice, of giving the devil his due.

4 It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. “You ‘like’
that horror — ?”

“ I could have liked him. And to me,” she said, “he was
no horror, I had accepted him.’”

T had accepted him.’ James, who had never taken a
great interest in his father’s Swedenborgianism, had
gathered enough to strengthen his own older more tradi-
tional heresy. For his father believed, in his own words.

39

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

that ‘the evil or hellish element in our nature* even when
out of divine order ... is yet not only no less vigorous
than the latter, but on the contrary much more vigorous,
sagacious, and productive of eminent earthly uses’ (so
one might describe the acquisition of Milly Theale’s
money). The difference, of course, was greater than the
resemblance. The son was not an optimist, he didn’t share
his father’s hopes of the hellish element, he only pitied
those who were immersed in it; and it is in the final
justice of his pity, the completeness of an analysis which
enabled him to pity the most shabby, the most corrupt,
of his human actors, that he ranks with the greatest of
creative writers. He is as solitary in the history of the
novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.

1936

40

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

I t is possible for an author’s friends to know him too well.
His books are hidden behind the fa<pade of his public life,
and his friends remember his conversations when they
have forgotten his characters. It is a situation which by
its irony appealed to Henry James. At the time of his own
siege of London, he took note of Robert Browning, the
veteran victor seen at every dinner table.

‘I have never ceased to ask myself [James wrote], in
this particular loud, sound, normal hearty presence, all
so assertive and so whole, all bristling with prompt re-
sponses and expected opinions and usual views ... I
never ceased, I say, to ask myself what lodgement, on
such premises, the rich proud genius one adored could
ever have contrived, what domestic commerce the
subtlety that was its prime ornament and the world’s
wonder have enjoyed, under what shelter the obscurity
that was its luckless drawback and the world’s despair
have flourished.’

It is a double irony that James himself should have so
disappeared behind the public life. There are times when
those who met him at Grosvenor House, those who dined
with him at Chelsea, even the favoured few who visited
him at Rye, seem, while they have remembered his pres-
ence (that great bald brow, those soothing and reassuring
gestures) and the curiosity of his conversation (the voice
ponderously refining and refining on his meaning), to
have forgotten his books. This, at any rate, is a possible
explanation of Mr MacCarthy’s statement in a delightful
and deceptive essay on e The World of Henry James ’ : 4 The
universe and religion are so completely excluded from

41

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

his books as if he had been an eighteenth-century writer.
The sky above his people, the earth beneath them, con-
tain no mysteries for them 5 , and in the same essay that
the religious sense ‘is singularly absent from his work’.

It would indeed be singular if the religious sense were
absent. Consider the father, the son of a Presbyterian and
intended for the ministry, who travelling in England was
possessed (during a nervous disorder) by the teaching of
Swedenborg and devoted the rest of his life to writing
theological books which no one read. His inspiration was
the same as William Blake’s and it was not less strong be-
cause its expression was chilled within the icy limits of
Boston. It is difficult to believe that a child brought
up by Henry James senior did not inherit a few of his
father’s perplexities if not his beliefs. Certainly he in-
herited a suspicion of organized religion, although that
suspicion conflicted with his deepest instinct, his passion
for Europe and tradition.

It is a platitude that in all his novels one is aware of
James’s deep love of age; not one generation had tended
the lawns of his country houses, but centuries of taste had
smoothed the grass and weathered the stone, ‘the warm,
weary brickwork’. This love of age and tradition, even
without his love of Italy, was enough to draw him to-
wards the Catholic Church as, in his own words, ‘the
most impressive convention in all history’. As early as
1869, in a letter from Rome, he noted its aesthetic appeal.

‘In St Peter’s I stayed some time. It’s even beyond its
reputation. It was filled with foreign ecclesiastics — great
armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of its
pavement- — an inexhaustible physiognomical study. To
crown my day, on my way home, I met his Holiness in

42

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

person — driving in prodigious purple state — sitting dim
within the shadows of his coach with two uplifted bene-
dictory fingers — like some dusky Hindoo idol in the
depths of its shrine. . . . From the high tribune of a great
chapel of St Peter’s I have heard in the Papal choir a
strange old man sing in a shrill unpleasant soprano. I’ve
seen troops of little tortured neophytes clad in scarlet,
marching and counter-marching and ducking and flop-
ping, like poor little raw recruits for the heavenly host . 5

But no one can long fail to discover how superficial is
the purely aesthetic appeal of Catholicism; it is more
accidental than the closeness of turf. The pageantry may
be well done and excite the cultured visitor or it may be ill
done and repel him. The Catholic Church has never
hesitated to indulge in the lowest forms of popular ‘art 5 ;
it has never used beauty for the sake of beauty. Any little
junk shop of statues and holy pictures beside a cathedral
is an example of what I mean. ‘The Catholic Church, as
churches go today , 5 James wrote in A Little Tour in
France , ‘ is certainly the most spectacular ; but it must feel
that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon
when it opens such sordid litde shops of sanctity as this . 5
If it had been true that Henry James had no religious
sense and that Catholicism spoke only to his aesthetic
sense, Catholicism and Henry James at this point would
finally have parted company; or if his religious sense had
been sufficiently vague and ‘numinous 5 , he would then
surely have approached the Anglican Church to discover
whether he could find there satisfaction for the sense of
awe and reverence, whether he could build within it his
system of ‘make-believe 5 . If the Anglican Church didnot
offer to his love of age so unbroken a tradition, it offered

43

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

to an Englishman or an American a purer literary appeal.
Crashaw’s style, if it occasionally has the beauty of those
‘marble plains’, is more often the poetical equivalent of
the shop for holy statues ; it has neither the purity nor the
emotional integrity of Herbert’s and Vaughan’s ; nor as
literature can the Douai Bible be compared with the
Authorized Version. And yet the Anglican Church never
gained the least hold on James’s interest, while the
Catholic Church seems to have retained its appeal to the
end. He never even felt the possibility of choice; it was
membership of the Catholic Church or nothing. Rowland
Mallet wondered ‘whether it be that one tacitly concedes
to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of
immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with
her for the precious gift one must do without it alto-
gether’.

In James’s first novel, Roderick Hudson , > published in
1875, six years after his first sight of the high tribune and
the tortured neophytes, the hero ‘pushed into St Peter’s,
in whose vast clear element the hardest particle of thought
ever infallibly entered into solution. From a heartache to
a Roman rain there were few contrarieties the great
church did not help him to forget.’ The same emotion
was later expressed in novel after novel. In times of men-
tal weariness, at moments of crisis, his characters in-
evitably find their way into some dim nave, to some lit
altar; Merton Densher, haunted by his own treachery,
enters the Brompton Oratory, ‘on the edge of a splendid
service — the flocking crowd told of it — which glittered
and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar
lights and the swell of organ and choir. It didn’t match
his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some
other things actual and possible.’

44

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

It is a rather lukewarm tribute to a religious system,
but Strether in The Ambassadors , published in 1903,
enters Notre-Dame for a more significant purpose.

"He was aware of having no errand in such a place but
the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain other places ;
a sense of safety, of simplification, which each time he
yielded to it he amused himself by thinking of as a private
concession to cowardice. The great church had no altar
for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was
none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel
while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a
plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. He was
tired, but he wasn’t plain — that was the pity and the
trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem
at the door very much as if it had been the copper piece
that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of
the inveterate blind beggar. He trod the long dim nave,
sat in the splendid choir, paused before the clustered
chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid
upon him its spell. . . . This form of sacrifice did at any
rate for the occasion as well as another ; it made him quite
sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the
real refugee, the things of the world could fall into abey-
ance. That was the cowardice, probably — to dodge them,
to beg the question, not to deal with it in the hard outer
light; but his own oblivions were too brief, too vain, to
hurt anyone but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful
kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of
mystery and anxiety, and whom, with observation for his
pastime, he ranked with those who were fleeing from
justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light, and in-
justice too; but one was as absent as the other from the

45

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many
altars/

It is worth noting, in connexion with Mr MacCarthy’s
criticism, that this was not Strether’s first visit to Notre-
Dame:

4 he had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by
himself— had quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance
and making no point of speaking of the adventure when
restored to his friends/

In 1875, Rowland Mallet found in St Peter’s relief for
most contrarieties 'from a heartache to a Roman rain’;
in 1903 Strether found in Notre-Dame c a sense of safety,
of simplification’ ; the difference is remarkably small, and
almost equally small the difference between Strether’s
feelings and those of the c real refugee’, whom he watches
‘from a respectable distance, remarking some note of
behaviour, of penitence, of prostration, of the absolved,
relieved state’. Strether wondered whether the attitude
of a woman who sat without prayer ‘ were some congruous
fruit of absolution, of 6 indulgence’. He knew but dimly
what indulgence, in such a place, might mean ; yet he had,
as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add
to the zest of active rights/ It would have been a more
astonishing avowal if Strether’s knowledge had been less
dim, and it must be admitted that the vagueness of
James’s knowledge, which led him sometimes ludicrously
astray, may have contributed to the emotional appeal.

But it would be unfair to attribute this constant intru-
sion of the Catholic Church merely to the unreasoning
emotions. There were dogmas in Catholic teaching,

46

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

avoided by the Anglican Church, which attracted
James, and one of these dealt with prayers for the
dead.

Mr MacCarthy mentions James’s horror of e the brutal-
ity and rushing confusion of the world, where the dead
are forgotten 5 , and James himself, trying to trace the
genesis of that beautiful and ridiculous story The Altar of
the Dead , came to the conclusion that the idea embodied
in it ‘had always, or from ever so far back, been there 5 .
This is not to say that he was conscious of how fully
Catholic teaching might have satisfied his desire not
merely to commemorate but to share life with the dead.
Commemoration — there is as much acreage of marble
monuments in the London churches as any man can need ;
James wanted something more living, something symbol-
ized in his mind, in the story to which I refer, by candles
on an altar. It was not exactly prayer, but how close it was
to prayer, how near James was to believing that the dead
have need of prayer, may be seen in the case of George
Stransom.

‘He had not had more losses than most men, but he
had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more
closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply. He had
formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it
had come to him early in life that there was something
one had to do for them. They were there in their simpli-
fied intensified essence, their conscious absence and ex-
pressive patience, as personally there as if they had only
been stricken dumb. When all sense of them failed, all
sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were
really still on earth: they asked so little that they got,
poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of

47

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the hard usage of life. They had no organized service, no
reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety/

The Altar of the Dead I have called ridiculous as well as
beautiful, and it is ridiculous because James never under-
stood that his desire to help the dead was not a personal
passion, that it did not require secret subjective rites.
Haunted by this idea of the neglected dead, c the general
black truth that London was a terrible place to die in by
the phrase of his foreign friend, as they watched a
funeral train * bound merrily by’ on its way to Kensal
Green, c Mourir a Londres , dest etre hien mort \ James was
literally driven into a church. Stransom leaves the grey
foggy afternoon for "a temple of the old persuasion,
and there had evidently been a function — perhaps a
service for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze of
candles. This was an exhibition he always liked, and he
dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had ever yet
come home to him it struck him as good there should be
churches/ This one might expect to be the end of Stran-
som’s search. He had only to kneel, to pray, to remember.
But again the subjective beauty of the story is cari-
catured by the objective action. Stransom buys an altar
for one of the chapels : 4 the altar and the sacred shell that
half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and custom-
ary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that
Stransom reserved to himself was the number of his lights,
and the free enjoyment of his intentions’. Surely no one
so near in spirit, at any rate in this one particular, to the
Catholic Church was ever so ignorant of its rules. How
was it that a writer as careful as James to secure the fullest
authenticity for his subjects could mar in this way one of
his most important stories ? It cannot be said that he had

48

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

not the time to study Catholicism: there was no limit to
the time which James would devote to anything remotely
connected with his art. Was it perhaps that the son of the
old Swedenborgian was afraid of capture? A friend of
James once spoke to him of a lady who had been con-
verted to Catholicism. James was silent for a long while;
then he remarked that he envied her.

The second point which may have attracted James to
the Church was its treatment of supernatural evil. The
Anglican Church had almost relinquished Hell. It
smoked and burned on Sundays only in obscure pro-
vincial pulpits, but no day passed in a Catholic Church
without prayers for deliverance from evil spirits ‘wander-
ing through the world for the ruin of souls’. This savage
elementary belief found an echo in James’s sophisticated
mind, to which the evil of the world was very present. He
faced it in his work with a religious intensity. The man
was sensitive, a lover of privacy, but it is absurd for Mr
MacCarthy to picture the writer ‘flying with frightened
eyes and stopped ears from that City of Destruction till
the terrified bang of his sanctuary door leaves him
palpitating but safe’.

If he fled from London to Rye, it was the better to
turn at bay. This imaginary world, which according to
Mr MacCarthy he created, people with ‘beings who had
leisure and the finest faculties for comprehending and
appreciating each other, where the reward of goodness
was the recognition of its beauty’, comes not from
James’s imagination but from Mr MacCarthy’s ; the world
of Henry James’s novels is a world of treachery and deceit,
a realist’s world in which Osmond is victorious, Isabel
Archer defeated, Densher gains his end and Milly Theale
dies disillusioned. The novels are only saved from the

4 — C.E.G.G.

49

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

deepest cynicism by the religious sense; the struggle be-
tween the beautiful and the treacherous is lent, as in
Hardy’s novels, the importance of the supernatural,
human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher,
for they are both capable of damnation. ‘ It is true to say ’,
Mr Eliot has written in an essay on Baudelaire, e that the
glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to
say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst
that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen to
thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.’
This worst cannot be said of James’s characters: both
Densher and the Prince have on their faces the flush of the
flames.

One remembers in this context the poor damned ghost
of Brydon’s other self, Brydon, the American expatriate
and cultured failure, who returns after many years and
in his New York house becomes aware of another pres-
ence, the self he might have been, unhappy and ravaged
with a million a year and ruined sight and crippled hand.
Through the great house he hunts the ghost, until it
turns at bay under the fanlight in the entrance hall.

< Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his
own substance and stature waited there to measure him-
self with his power to dismay. This only could it be —
this only till he recognized, with his advance, that what
made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that
covered it and in which, so far from being offered in
defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Bry-
don, before him, took him in ; with every fact of him now,
in the higher light, hard and acute — his planted stillness,
his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking
hands, his queer actuality of evening dress, of dangling

50

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

double eyeglass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen,
of pearl button and gold watchguard and polished shoe.
... He could but gape at his other self in this other an-
guish, gape as a proof that he , standing there for the
achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be
faced in his triumph. Wasn’t the proof in the splendid
covering hands, strong and completely spread? — so
spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity
that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these
hands had lost two fingers which were reduced to stumps,
as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually
guarded and saved.’

When the hands drop they disclose a face of horror,
evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, and as the ghost advances,
Brydon falls back c as under the hot breath and the
roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of
personality before which his own collapsed’.

The story has been quoted by an American critic as an
example of the fascination and repulsion James felt for
his country. The idea that he should have stayed and
faced his native scene never left him; he never ceased to
wonder whether he had not cut himself off from the
source of deepest inspiration. This the story reveals on
one level of consciousness ; on a deeper level it is not too
fanciful to see in it an expression of faith in man’s ability
to damn himself. A rage of personality — it is a quality
of the religious sense, a spiritual quality which the
materialist writer can never convey, not even Dickens,
by the most adept use of exaggeration.

It is tempting to reinforce this point — James’s belief in
supernatural evil — with The Turn of the Screw. Here in
the two evil spirits— Peter Quint, the dead valet, with

5i

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

his ginger hair and his little whiskers and his air of an
actor and c his white face of damnation’, and Miss Jessel
‘dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty,
and her unutterable woe 5 — is the explicit breath of Hell.
They declare themselves in every attitude and glance,
with everything but voice, to be suffering the torments of
the damned, the torments which they intend the two
children to share. It is tempting to point to the scene of
Miles’s confession, which frees him from the possession
of Peter Quint. But James himself has uttered too clear a
warning. The story is, in his own words, £ a fairy-tale pure
and simple’, something seasonable for Christmas, ‘a
piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic
calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught
. . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious’. So a
valuable ally must be relinquished, not without a mental
reservation that no one by mere calculation could have
made the situation so ‘reek with the air of Evil’ and
amazement that such a story should have been thought
seasonable for Christmas.

Hell and Purgatory, James came very close to a direct
statement of his belief in both of these. What personal
experience of treachery and death stood between the
author of Washington Square and The Bostonians and the
* author of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl is
not known. The younger author might have developed
into the gentle urbane social critic of Mr MacCarthy’s
imagination, the latter writer is only just prevented from
being as explicitly religious as Dostoevsky by the fact
that neither a philosophy nor a creed ever emerged from
his religious sense. His religion was always a mirror of
his experience. Experience taught him to believe in
supernatural evil, but not in supernatural good. Milly

52

HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT

Theale is all human; her courage has not the super-
natural support which holds Kate Croy and Catherine
Stant in a strong coil. The rage of personality is all the
devil’s. The good and the beautiful meet betrayal with
patience and forgiveness, but without sublimity, and
their death is at best a guarantee of no more pain. Ralph
Touchett dying at Gardencourt only offers himself the
consolation that pain is passing. C I don’t know why we
should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out.’

It would be wrong to leave the impression that James’s
religious sense ever brought him nearer than hailing
distance to an organized system, even to a system or-
ganized by himself. The organizing ability exhausted itself
in his father and elder brother. James never tried to state
a philosophy and this reluctance to trespass outside his art
may have led Mr MacCarthy astray. But no one, with the
example of Hardy before them, can deny that James was
right. The novelist depends preponderantly on his
personal experience, the philosopher on correlating the
experience of others, and the novelist’s philosophy will
always be a little lop-sided. There is much in common
between the pessimism of Hardy and of James ; both had
a stronger belief in supernatural evil than in supernatural
good, and if James had, like Hardy, tried to systematize
his ideas, his novels too would have lurched with the
same one-sided gait. They retain their beautiful sym-
metry at a price, the price which Turgenev paid and
Dostoevsky refused to pay, the price of refraining from
adding to the novelist’s distinction that of a philosopher
or a religious teacher of the second rank.

1933

53

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

‘The conception of a certain young lady affronting her
destiny 5 — that is how Henry James described the subject
of this book, for which he felt, next to The Ambassadors ,
the greatest personal tenderness. In his wonderful preface
(for no other book in the collected edition of his works
did he write a preface so rich in revelations and memories)
he compares The Portrait of a Lady several times to a
building, and it is as a great, leisurely built cathedral that
one thinks of it, with immense smooth pillars, side-
chapels and aisles, and a dark crypt where Ralph
Touchett lies in marble like a crusader with his feet
crossed to show that he has seen the Holy Land; some-
times, indeed, it may seem to us too ample a shrine for
one portrait until we remember that this master-crafts-
man always has his reasons : those huge pillars are required
to bear the weight of Time (that dark backward and
abysm that is the novelist’s abiding problem): the suc-
cession of side-chapels are all designed to cast their
particular light upon the high altar: no vista is without
its ambiguous purpose. The whole building, indeed, is a
triumph of architectural planning: the prentice hand
which had already produced some works — Roderick Hud-
son and The American — impressive if clumsy, and others
— The Europeans and Washington Square — graceful if
slight, had at last learnt the whole secret of planning for
permanence. And the subject ? 6 A certain young woman
affronting her destiny. 5 Does it perhaps still, at first
thought, seem a little inadequate ?

The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the
destiny, and about the destiny Henry James has in his
preface nothing to tell us. He is always something of a
conjurer in these prefaces; he seems ready to disclose

54

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

everything — the source of his story: the technique of its
writing: even the room in which he settles down to work
and the noises of the street outside. Sometimes he blinds
the reader with a bold sleight of hand, calling, for example,
‘The Turn of the Screw 5 £ a fairy-tale pure and simple \ We
must always remain on our guard while reading these
prefaces, for at a certain level no writer has really dis-
closed less.

The plot in the case of this novel is far from being an
original one: it is as if James, looking round for the events
which were to bring his young woman, Isabel Archer,
into play, had taken the first to hand: a fortune-hunter,
the fortune-hunter’s unscrupulous mistress, and a young
American heiress caught in the meshes of a loveless mar-
riage. (He was to use almost identically the same plot but
with deeper implications and more elaborate undertones
in The Wings of the Dove,) We can almost see the young
James laying down some popular three-decker of the
period in his Roman or Venetian lodgings and wondering,
‘What could I do with even that story ? 5 For a plot after
all is only the machinery — the machinery which will
show the young woman (what young woman ?) affronting
her destiny (but what destiny ?). In his preface, apparently
so revealing, James has no answer to these questions. Nor
is there anything there which will help us to guess what
element it was in the melodramatic plot that attracted the
young writer at this moment when he came first into his
full powers as a novelist, and again years later when as an
old man he set to work to crown his career with the three
poetic masterpieces. The Wings of the Dove , The Ambas-
sadors, and The Golden Bowl .

The first question is the least important and we have
the answer in Isabel Archer’s relationship to Milly Theale

55

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

in The Wings of the Dove . It is not only their predicament
which is the same, or nearly so (Milly’s fortune-hunter,
Merton Densher, was enriched by the later James with a
conscience, a depth of character, a dignity in his corrup-
tion that Gilbert Osmond lacks: indeed in the later book
it is the fortune-hunter who steals the tragedy, for Milly
dies and it is the living whom we pity) : the two women
are identical. Milly Theale, if it had not been for her
fatal sickness, would have affronted the same destiny and
met the same fate as Isabel Archer: the courage, the
generosity, the confidence and inexperience belong to the
same character, and James has disclosed to us the source
of the later portrait — his young and much-loved cousin
Mary Temple who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four.
This girl of infinite potentiality, whose gay sad troubled
letters can be read in Notes of a Son and Brother , haunted
his memory like a legend; it was as if her image stood for
everything that had been graceful, charming, happy in
youth — ‘the whole world of the old New York, that of
the earlier dancing years 5 — everything that was to be
betrayed by life. We have only to compare these pages of
his autobiography, full of air and space and light, in which
the figures of the son and brother, the Albany uncles, the
beloved cousin, move like the pastoral figures in a Poussin
landscape, with his description of America when he re-
visited the States in his middle age, to see how far he had
travelled, how life had closed in. In his fiction he travelled
even farther. In his magnificent last short story, Brydon,
the returned expatriate, finds his old New York house
haunted by the ghost of himself, the self he would
have become if he had remained in America. At that
moment one remembers what James also remembered:
‘the springtime of "65 as it breathed through Denton

56

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

streets’, the summer twilight sailing back from Newport,
Mary Temple.

‘ In none of the company was the note so clear as in this
rarest, though at the same time symptomatically or
ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural at
more points and about more things, with a greater sense
of freedom and ease and reach of horizon than any of the
others dreamed of. They had that way, delightfully, with
the small, after all, and the common matters — while she
had it with those too, but with the great and rare ones
over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very
figure and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as
magnanimously far spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely
fixed, as her splendid shifting sensibility, moral, personal,
nervous, and having at once such noble flights and such
touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of indifference
and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She
was really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme
case of a taste for life as life, as personal living, of an
endlessly active and yet somehow a careless, an illusion-
less, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it ; something
that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and
charming tossed head, with long and yet almost sliding
steps and a large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the
very muse or amateur priestess of rash speculation . 5

Even if we had not James’s own word for it, we could
never doubt that here is the source: the fork of his
imagination was struck and went on sounding. Mary
Temple, of course, never affronted her destiny: she was
betrayed quite simply by her body, and James uses words
of her that he could as well have used of Milly Theale

57

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

dying in her Venetian palace — "death at the last was
dreadful to her; she would have given anything to live’,
but isn’t it significant that whenever an imaginary future
is conceived for this brave spontaneous young woman it
always ends in betrayal ? Milly Theale escapes from her
betrayal simply by dying; Isabel Archer, tied for life to
Gilbert Osmond — that precious vulgarian, cold as a
fishmonger’s slab — is deserted even by her creator. For
how are we to understand the ambiguity of the closing
pages when Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, tries to
comfort the faithful and despairing "follower’ (this word
surely best describes Caspar Goodwood’s relationship to
Isabel)?

"""Look here, Mr Goodwood,” she said, ""just you
wait l”

On which he looked up at her — but only to guess,
from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he
was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap
comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life.
She walked him away with her, however, as if she had
given him now the key to patience.’

It is as if James, too, were handing his more casual
readers the key to patience, while at the same time
asserting between the lines that there is no way out of the
inevitable betrayal except the way that Milly Theale and
Mary Temple took involuntarily. There is no possibility
of a happy ending: this is surely what James always tells
us, not with the despairing larger-than-life gesture of a
romantic novelist but with a kind of bitter precision. He
presents us with a theorem, but it is we who have to work
out the meaning of x and discover that x equals no-way-

58

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

out. It is part of the permanent fascination of his style
that he never does all the work for us, and there will
always be careless mathematicians prepared to argue the
meaning of that other ambiguous ending, when Merton
Densher, having gained a fortune with Milly Theale’s
death, is left alone with his mistress, Kate Croy, who had
planned it all, just as Mme Merle had planned Isabel’s
betrayal.

4 He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but
not moving. Then he only said: ‘Til marry you, mind
you, in an hour.”

“As we were?”

“As we were.”

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was
now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”’

Some of James’s critics have preferred to ignore the
real destiny of his characters, and they can produce many
of his false revealing statements to support them; he has
been multitudinously discussed as a social novelist
primarily concerned with the international scene, with
the impact of the Old World on the New. It is true the
innocent figure is nearly always American (Roderick
Hudson, Newman, Isabel and Milly, Maggie Verver and
her father), but the corrupted characters — the vehicles
for a sense of evil unsurpassed by the theological novelists
of our day, M, Mauriac or M. Bernanos — are also
American: Mme Merle, Gilbert Osmond, Kate Croy,
Merton Densher, Charlotte Stant. His characters are
mainly American, simply because James himself was
American.

No, it was only on the superficial level of plot, one
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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

feels, that James was interested in the American visitor;
what deeply interested him, what was indeed his ruling
passion, was the idea of treachery, the e Judas complex’.
In a very early novel which he never reprinted, Watch
and Ward , James dealt with the blackmailer, the man
enabled to betray because of his intimate knowledge. As
he proceeded in his career he shed the more obvious
melodramatic trappings of betrayal, and in The Portrait
of a Lady , melodrama is at the point of vanishing. What
was to follow was only to be the turning of the screw.
Isabel Archer was betrayed by little more than an
acquaintance; Milly Theale by her dearest friend ; until
we reach the complicated culmination of treacheries in
The Golden Bowl. But how many turns and twists of
betrayal we could follow, had we space and time, be-
tween Watch and Ward and that grand climax!

This then is the destiny that not only the young women
affront — you must betray or, more fortunately perhaps,
you must be betrayed. A few — James himself, Ralph
Touchett in his novel, Mrs Assingham in The Golden
Bowl — will simply sadly watch. We shall never know
what it was at the very start of life that so deeply impres-
sed on the young James’s mind this sense of treachery;
but when we remember how patiently and faithfully
throughout his life he drew the portrait of one young
woman who died, one wonders whether it was just simply
a death that opened his eyes to the inherent disappoint-
ment of existence, the betrayal of hope. The eyes once
open, the material need never fail him. He could sit there,
an ageing honoured man in Lamb House, Rye, and hear
the footsteps of the traitors and their victims going
endlessly by on the pavement. It is of James himself that
we think when we read in The Portrait of a Lady of Ralph

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THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Touchett’s melancholy vigil in the big house in Win-
chester Square:

"The square was still, the house was still, when he
raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the
air he heard the slow creak of the boots of a lone con-
stable. His own step, in the empty place, seemed loud and
sonorous ; some of the carpets had been raised, and when-
ever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down
in one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table
twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the
pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked
vague and incoherent. There was a ghostly presence as of
dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its
actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had some-
thing to do with the fact that his imagination took a
flight and that he remained in his chair a long time
beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed;
doing nothing not even reading the evening paper. I say
he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of
the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel.’

1947

61

THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES

There had always been — let us face it — a suspicion of
vulgarity about the Old Master. Just as the tiny collo-
quialism was sometimes hidden unnoticeably away in the
intricate convolutions of his sentences, so one was some-
times fleetingly aware of small clouds — difficult to detach
in the bland wide sunlit air of his later world — of some-
thing closely akin to the vulgar. Was it sometimes his
aesthetic approach to the human problem, his use of the
word c beautiful’ in connexion with an emotional situa-
tion ? Was it sometimes a touch of aesthetic exclusiveness
as in the reference to Poynton and its treasures, c there
were places much grander and richer, but no such com-
plete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
really informed 5 ? Was it sometimes a hidden craving for
the mere treasures themselves, for the cash value ? We
must do James justice. He would not have altered a
sentence of a novel or a story for the sake of popularity or
monetary reward, but the craving was there, disguised by
references to financial problems that did not really exist
— his private income was adequate, even comfortable.
But if only, it surely occurred to him, there were some
literary Tom Tiddler’s ground he could enter as a
stranger, where he would not be compromised if observed
in the act of stooping to pick up the gold and silver; in
that case he was ready for a while to put integrity in the
drawer and turn the key. Fate was kind to him: other
artists have had the same intention and have been caught
by success. James found neither cash nor credit on the
stage and returned enriched by his failure.

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that the appeal
of the theatre to James was purely commercial. He was
challenged, as any artist, by a new method of expression ;

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THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES

the pride and interest in attempting the difficult and the
new possessed him. He wrote to his brother:

‘ I feel at last as if I had found my real form, which I am
capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of
fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me, but a
limited and restricted substitute. The strange thing is
that I always, universally, knew this was my more char-
acteristic form — but was kept away from it by a half-
modest, half-exaggerated sense of the difficulty (that is, I
mean the practical odiousness) of the conditions. But
now that I have accepted them and met them, I see that
one isn’t at all, needfully, their victim, but is, from the
moment one is anything, one’s self, worth speaking of,
their master : and may use them, command them, squeeze
them, lift them up and better them. As for the form
itself y its honour and inspiration are (a defaut cTautres) in
its difficulty. If it were easy to write a good play I couldn’t
and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact damnably hard
(to this truth the paucity of the article — in the English-
speaking world — testifies), and that constitutes a solid
respectability — guarantees one’s intellectual self-respect.’

But even in this mood is not the self-respect a little too
underlined, the protest purposely loud to drown another
note, which was to be repeated again and again? 4 1 am
very impatient to get to work writing for the stage — a
project I have long had. Iam . . . certain I should succeed
and it would be an open gate to money making,’ and
later he turned with some ignobility on Wilde, when The
Importance of Being Earnest had followed his own cata-
strophic failure Guy Domville at the St James’s Theatre:
* There is nothing fortunately so dead as a dead play —

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

unless it be sometimes a living one. Oscar Wilde’s farce
... is, I believe, a great success — and with his two
roaring successes running now at once he must be raking
in the profits.’ The ring of the counter is in the phrase.

Until Mr Edel published this huge volume* (over 800
pages, the greater part in double column) we had no idea
how completely James had failed. The two volumes of
Theatricals published in his lifetime were slight affairs.
The theatre of his time was so bad, we had wondered
whether it was not possible that his contemporaries had
simply failed to recognize his genius as a playwright. We
knew the sad story of the production of Guy Domville ,
the successful first act, the laughter in the second, the
storm of catcalls at the close; we had heard how the
critics had defended it, how the prose was praised by
the young Bernard Shaw, and yet there existed, so far as
one could discover, only a typewritten copy in the Lord
Chamberlain’s office. Yes, one had expectations and
excitement. Now the picture has been filled in, and read-
ing the deplorable results of * the theatrical years ’ we need
to bear always in mind James’s recovery. This is un-
mistakably trash, but it is not the end of a great writer:
out of the experience and failure with another technique
came the three great novels The Wings of the Dove y The
Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl He was never so much of
a dramatist as when he had ceased to have theatrical
ambitions.

Mr Edel has done a magnificent editorial work. Why
should the word painstaking’ carry implications of dull-
ness ? Here every pain has been taken and every pain has
had its reward. Each play has a separate factual preface of
extreme readability: particularly fascinating is the long

* The Complete Plays of Henry James r, edited by Leon Edel.

64

THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES

preface to Guy Domville which traces the disastrous first
night almost hour by hour : the early afternoon when two
unknown ladies sent a telegram from Sloane Street Post
Office to George Alexander, ‘With hearty wishes for a
complete failure’; James sitting in the Haymarket listen-
ing to Wilde’s epigrams and unaware of the applause at
his own first curtain; the disastrous laughable hat in the
second act; the first mutter from the gallery in the third,
when Alexander began to deliver the speech, ‘ I am the
last, my lord, of the Domvilles,’ to be answered, c It’s a
bloody good thing y’are’; the pandemonium at the close
when this too sensitive author, who had anticipated fail-
ure but not this savage public execration, was flung
helplessly into the turmoil from the peace of the night in
St James’s Square and fled into the wings his face ‘green
with dismay’; the grim first night supper party which
took place ‘as arranged’.

It is easier now to understand the public than the critics
who were perhaps influenced by horror of the Roman
holiday. H. G. Wells found the play ‘finely conceived and
beautifully written’ : Shaw wrote, ‘Line after line comes
with such a delicate turn and fall that I unhesitatingly
challenge any of our popular dramatists to write a scene
in verse with half the beauty of Mr James’s prose. . . .
Guy Domville is a story and not a mere situation hung out
on a gallows of plot. And it is a story of fine sentiment and
delicate manners, with an entirely worthy and touching
ending/ To us today the story of Guy Domville seems
singularly unconvincing, one more example of the not
always fortunate fascination exercised on James by the
Christian faith and by Catholicism in particular. It stands
beside The Altar of the Dead and The Great Good Place
as an example of how completely James could miss the

5 — C.E.G.G. 65

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

point. Mr Edei writes truly of James’s interest in
Catholicism being mainly an interest in a refuge and a
retreat; when James wrote in that mood from the outside
he conveyed a genuine and moving sense of nostalgia.
But in Guy Domville he was rashly attempting to convey
the sense of Catholicism from within: his characters are
Catholics* his hero a young man brought up to become a
priest. Domville is on the eve of leaving England to enter
a seminary when he becomes heir to a fortune and estate
(money again!) and is tempted temporarily by a mis-
taken sense of duty to his family to re-enter the world.
The story is set in the eighteenth century* and the period
falls like a dead hand over the prose. Unlike the hero of
The Sense of the Past we never really go back. Can we
believe in a young man who speaks of a girl as 'attached
to our Holy Church’ ? There is really more truth to the
religious life in the novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward. Here
for example is Guy Domville" s first reply to temptation:

4 Break with all the past* and break with it this minute ?
— turn back from the threshold* take my hand from the
plough ? — the hour is too troubled* your news too strange,
your summons too sudden!’

Strangely enough the failure of Guy Domville was not
the end. Now that he had given up any hopes of stage
success* perhaps he felt a certain freedom in his relations
with that ' insufferable little art’. The love affair was at an
end and he need no longer try to please. 'The hard
meagreness inherent in the theatrical form’ could be
ignored. One critic had observed of his early plays* 'We
wish very much that Mr James would write some farces
to please himself* and not to please the stage’, and right

66

THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES

at the close with The Outcry — a thin amusing story of
how a picture was saved for the nation against the will of
the owner, an individualistic peer who wanted to sell it
for sheer cussedness to an American dealer — he very
nearly succeeded in producing an actable comedy. A
comedy, for the author of The Turn of the Screw and The
Wings of the Dove strangely failed when he tried on the
stage to express the horrors or tragedies of the human
situation. 4 You don’t know — but we’re abysses,’ one of
the characters cried in his creaking melodrama, The
Other House , but it was just the sense of the abyss that he
failed on those flat boards ever to convey. Turn to his
ghost story of Owen Wingrave , the story of a young man
who refused to continue the military tradition of his
family and died bravely facing the supernatural in his own
home 0 Owen Wingrave, dressed as he had last seen him,
lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been
found. He was all the young soldier on the gained field’)
and compare the dignity of this story, which does indeed
convey a sense of the abyss, with the complicated and
unspeakable prattle of the stage adaptation.

‘That proud old Sir Philip, and that wonderful Miss
Wingrave, Deputy Governor, herself, of the Family
Fortress — that they with their immense Military Tradi-
tion, and with their particular responsibility to his gallant
Father, the Soldier Son, the Soldier Brother sacrificed
on an Egyptian battlefield, and whose example — as that of
his dead Mother’s, of so warlike a race too — it had been
their religion to keep before him; that they should take
sudden startling action hard is a fact I indeed understand
and appreciate. But — I maintain it to you — I should
deny my own intelligence if I didn’t find our young man,

67

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

at our crisis, and certainly at his , more interesting, per-
haps than ever ! 5

Unwillingly we have to condemn the Master for a fault
we had previously never suspected the possibility of his
possessing — incompetence.

1950

68

THE DARK BACKWARD: A FOOTNOTE

‘This eternal time-question is . . . for the novelist always
there and always formidable; always insisting on the
effect of the great lapse and passage, of the “dark back-
ward and abysm,” by the terms of truth, and on the
effect of compression, of composition and form, by the
terms of literary arrangement. It is really a business to
terrify all but stout hearts. . . So Henry James in the
preface to his first novel, written at the end of his career
when he could see all the difficulties.

The moment comes to every writer worth considera-
tion when he faces for the first time something which he
knows he cannot do. It is the moment by which he will be
judged, the moment when his individual technique will
be evolved. For technique is more than anything else a
means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising
a deficiency. The whole magnificent achievement of
James’s prefaces is from this point of view like a confes-
sion of failure. He is telling how he hid the traces of the
botched line.

The consciousness of what he cannot do— and it is some-
times something so apparently simple that a more popu-
lar writer never gives it a thought — is a mark of the good
novelist. The second-rate novelists never know: nothing
is beyond their sublimely foolish confidence as they turn
out their great epics of European turmoil or industrial
unrest, their family sagas. The Lake novelists, the Severn
novelists, the Yorkshire novelists, the Jewish novelists,
they stream by, like recruits in the first month of a war,
with a folie de grandeur on their march to oblivion. Not
for them the plan of campaign, the recognition of im-
penetrable enemy lines which cannot be taken by direct
assault, which must be turned or for which new instru-

69

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

ments of war must be invented. And they have their uses
as cannon fodder. They are the lives lost in proving the
ineffectiveness of the frontal assault. (There is irony, of
course, in the fact that the technique an original writer
uses to cover his personal difficulties will later be taken
over by other writers who may not share his difficulties
and who believe that his value has lain in his method.)

It is from this point of view that I want to touch on
three admirable novelists, whose works I have lately been
reading or re-reading: Mr Ford Madox Ford, Miss
Elizabeth Bowen, and Mr Calder-Marshall. One cannot
in a short essay study all the inabilities which have gone
to the making of their methods, but the quotation from
James’s preface to Roderick Hudson does indicate one
inability they have in common.

I suppose even the popular writer, little given as he
usually is to self-criticism, feels that supreme difficulty.
We need not be so uncharitable as to believe that he
writes long books only because long books pay. He is
trying to give significance to the individual story by
extending it in time. Mrs Soames Forsyte may not seem
significant, nor her little adulterous drama, but if we
write as well about Mr Forsyte’s parents and his children,
surely, he thinks, we shall get somewhere. Length becomes
a substitute for sensitivity, and the long book is the
obvious, the frontal assault on the sense of time. The
method is invariably dull, but certainly, by its accumula-
tion of trivialities, its digressions, it does achieve an
effect, though it is an effect which has more in common
with a dub bore than with art. The popular novelist
rushes in where even the angels. . . . Henry James never
wrote a novd which covered a quarter of the period of
Mr Brett Young’s White Ladies .

70

THE DARK BACKWARD: A FOOTNOTE

But though we may not want to follow a family’s
fortunes through three generations, we are not less faced
with time. Our characters have lived outside the story,
and even if within the story they have only a month to
spend, that month makes demands it is not easy to meet.

I suspect that this c time’ problem is one of Mr Calder-
MarshalTs main difficulties, for since his first novel when
he attempted to convey the passage of time quite con-
ventionally, he has tried to avoid it altogether inside the
story and outside the story. One can see very clearly here
how the individual writer has been bom of his deficien-
cies. About Levy took place during the few days of a
murder trial, At Sea during the twenty-four hours when
a young honeymooning couple were adrift in an open
boat in the Channel, his novel. Dead Centre , has more
than sixty characters belonging to a public school who
are each allowed to express themselves for no more than
a page or two, to describe an incident, to give a quick
impression of their personalities at the moment with
hardly any reference at all to the ‘dark backward’. Here
Mr Calder-Marshall, by his choice of theme as well
as method, has disguised his inability to convey the sense
of time. He has made a virtue, the virtue of things seen
by a lightning flash vivid and there and gone again, out of
a deficiency. But there is weakness if the deficiency
continues to dictate the theme as well as the method;
that is to make things easy and an individual technique
thrives on difficulty.

Miss Bowen certainly does not let her inability to de-
scribe the passage of time dictate the theme. Her novel,
The House in Parts, covers a period from before the birth
of an illegitimate child until he has reached the age of
nine. The popular novelist would have described every

7 *

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

one of those years, however dull to the reader the ac-
cumulation of trivialities. Miss Bowen has simply left
them out with the merest glance backward; we may
believe that she has been forced to omit, but she has made
of her omissions a completely individual method, she has
dramatized ignorance. How with so little known of the
c backward and abysm ’ can she convey her characters with
any clearness ? It is impossible, but her consciousness of
that impossibility proves her great value as a novelist.
She makes it the virtue of her characters that they are
three parts mystery; the darkness which hides their past
makes the cerebrations which we are allowed to follow
the more vivid, as vivid as the exchanges of people over-
heard talking on a platform before a train goes out. It is
an exquisite sleight of hand : the egg was in the hat, now
it is being removed from the tip of a robust woman’s
nose. We must fill in for ourselves what happened be-
tween; the burden of that problem is passed to the reader.
To the author remains the task of making the characters
understand each other without our losing the sense of
mystery: they must be able to tell all from a gesture, a
whisper, a written sentence: they have to be endowed
with an inhuman intuition as James’s characters were
endowed with an inhuman intelligence, and no writer
since James has proved capable of a more cunning eva-
sion. Unable to convey the passage of time, she has made
capital out of the gap in the records ; how can we doubt
the existence of a past which these characters can so
easily convey to each other ?

When one finds Mr Ford Madox Ford, the most able
of these novelists, devising a technique more complicated
than Conrad’s to disguise the same time-problem, one
begins to wonder whether any novelist has found it

72

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

never history. You are condemned to write of a perpetual
present and to convey the shrillness of its emotions.

‘Poverty invaded them. The police raided the house in
search of her brother and his friends. Then her brother
went to prison somewhere in the Midlands. The friend-
liness of their former neighbours turned to surly suspi-
cion. They could get no milk. Food became almost
unprocurable without going to long distances. For three
days Mrs Wannop was clean out of her mind. Then she
grew better and began to write a new book. . . . 5

Mr Ford does not, like Miss Bowen, simply leave out;
he puts in the links in his own good time, but they are
properly subordinated to what he can do supremely well,
dialogue and the dramatic scene.

And now — if this were more than a footnote — one
would have to consider James himself. There would be
the most exciting, the most baffling search. What defects
was he hiding behind the strict rules he invented for the
novel ? Undoubtedly they are there, but no novelist has
so successfully disguised them with what he called
‘delightful dissimulation 5 . The completeness of the dis-
simulation is the measure of his genius ; but it remains a
pleasantly ironic thought that the magnificent structure
of his last novels, the complexity of his ‘points of view 5 ,
are arranged to the same end, to evade something which
even he could not do, something which may be taken in
the easy regardless stride of the latest Book Society
choice.

1935

74

TWO FRIENDS

No smaller distance than that between Samoa and De
Vere Gardens, Kensington, you might have guessed,
separated these two characters, Henry James and Robert
Louis Stevenson. On the one side that great domed brow,
that reputable beard which evoked incongruously in the
mind of some acquaintances a resemblance to the Prince
of Wales, broad shoulders that seemed perpetually a
little bent by crouching too long over a precious flame,
fanning it one moment, guarding it with protective hand
another, never relaxing vigilance whether at a dinn er
party or at a desk in the small hours: on the other, the
man with the hollow nervous face, the thin gangling legs,
the over-publicized moustache, splashing through fords
at midnight, risking a bullet in parochial politics, en-
dangering his life every day he lived for no apparent
purpose except perhaps a desperate desire to prove that
he could be something other than a writer. On what was
this odd friendship based ?

Miss Janet Adam Smith, the author of the most per-
ceptive life of Stevenson, has put us further in her debt
by compiling this record of friendship.* Most of the
letters printed here are known to us already, though in
the case of Stevenson in garbled Colvin versions, but how
seldom it is that we can read both sides of a correspon-
dence together. A letter gains by its reply: the mirror in
De Vere Gardens gains in depth when we see the answer-
ing flash from Samoa. Miss Adam Smith sees in the
friendship the aesthetic appeal to James of Stevenson’s
situation:

‘The man living under the daily threat of a fatal

* Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. A Record of Friend-
ship and Criticism, edited by Janet Adam Smith.

75

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

haemorrhage, yet with such an appetite for the active life;
the novelist who could only gain the health and energy
for writing at the risk of dissipating them on other ends;
the writer who had to spur his talent to earn more and
more money to pay for the life of action that kept him
alive; the continual tug between the claims of life and
literature — here was a situation not unlike those which
had provided James with the germ of a novel or story. 5

This is understandable; Stevenson’s friendship for
James is perhaps more unexpected. The literary charac-
ter is not noted for generosity and Stevenson was well
aware that James was the superior artist. In the public
controversy on the art of the novel with which this collec-
tion and their friendship open, Stevenson scored some
good debating points against James in the argument
whether or not art could ‘compete’ with life, and the
readers of Longman's Magazine preferred, no doubt, his
cleverly varied cadences and sudden metaphors to the
weighty seriousness of the older writer. ‘These phantom
reproductions of experience, even at their most acute,
convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the
cockpit of life, can torture and slay’; ‘catching the very
note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that
is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon
her feet’. The first metaphor startles, like a handful of
pebbles flung against a window; the other imperceptibly,
invincibly, flows like a sea.

At this period James was selling less and less and
Stevenson more and more — a difficult period for the
more successful man. ‘There must be something wrong
in me, or I would not be popular ’ — the doomed Calvinis-
tic conscience directed at his own work saved Stevenson

7 6

TWO FRIENDS

from self-justification as well as from pride. c What the
public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed ;
so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and
knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be
a little dull into the bargain . 5 He was never deceived by
acclamation — not even by the acclamation of Gosse or
Colvin, for he had learned in childhood that salvation is
always for the other man. In the years of adolescence he
had rebelled, but he had never regarded himself as
innocent and his father as guilty. So now perhaps it was
easier for him than it would have been for a less scrupulous
character to maintain his devotion to a greater man.
Criticism from James never came amiss. He would
defend, but he would never resent.

‘The only thing I miss in the book is the note of
visibility — it subjects my visual sense, my seeing imagina-
tion, to an almost painful underfeeding. The hearing
imagination, as it were, is nourished like an alderman,
and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the
baffled lust of the eyes — 5

So James on Catriona and Stevenson replies :

‘Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still
more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving
of the visual sense of that book. 5 Tis true, and unless I
make the greater effort — and am, as a step to that, con-
vinced of its necessity — it will be more true I fear in the
future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and
that seems to me to be fiction, My two aims may be de-
scribed as —

77

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

ist. War to the adjective.

2nd. Death to the optic nerve.

Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature.
For how many centuries did literature get along without
a sign of it ?’

This book will appeal to all interested in the technique
of the novelist, and it should do much to raise Stevenson’s
unjustly fallen reputation. Who today can afford to
patronize a novelist to whom James wrote with a copy of
The Tragic Muse that he was "the sole and single Anglo-
Saxon capable of perceiving . . . how well it is written’ ?
James was capable of oriental courtesy to his inferiors,
but the praise he gives to Stevenson has the directness
and warmth of equality. c He lighted up one whole side of
the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s
imagination. 5

1948

78

FROM FEATHERS TO IRON

Stevenson’s reputation has suffered perhaps more
from his early death than from any other cause. He was
only forty-four when he died, and he left behind him
what mainly amounts to a mass of juvenilia. Gay, bright,
and perennially attractive though much of his work may
be, it has a spurious maturity which hides the fact that,
like other men, he was developing. Indeed it was only in
the last six years of his life — the Samoan years — that his
fine dandified talent began to shed its disguising graces,
the granite to show through. And how rich those last
years were; The Wrong Box , The Master of Ballantrae ,
The Island Nights* Entertainments , The Ebb Tide > and
Weir of Hermiston. Could he have kept it up ? Henry
James wondered of the last unfinished book and added
with gracious pessimism, £ the reason for which he didn’t
reads itself back into his text as a kind of beautiful rash
divination in him that he mightn’t have to. Among prose
fragments it stands quite alone, with the particular grace
and sanctity of mutilation worn by the marble morsels of
masterwork in another art.’

Unfortunately Stevenson’s reputation was not left in the
hands of so cautious and subtle a critic. The early affected
books of travel by canoe and donkey, the too personal
letters full of ‘rot about a fellow’s behaviour’, with a slang
that rings falsely on the page like an obscenity in a
parson’s mouth, the immature musings on his craft
(‘ Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child ’),
the early ethical essays of Virgmibus Puerisque , all these
were thrust into the foreground by the appearance of
collected edition after collected edition: his youthful
thoughts still sprinkle the commercial calendars with
quotations. His comparatively uneventful life (adventu-

79

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

rous only to the sedate Civil Service minds of Colvin and
Gosse) was magnified into a saga : early indiscretions were
carefully obliterated from the record, until at last his
friends had their reward — that pale hollow stuffed figure
in a velvet jacket with a Lang moustache, kneeling by a
chair of native wood, with the pokerwork mottoes just
behind the head — ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing
than to arrive’, etc., etc. Did it never occur to these in-
dustrious champions that as an adventurer, as a man of
religion, as a traveller, as a friend of the ‘coloured races’
he must wither into insignificance beside that other Scots-
man, with the name rather like his own but the letters
reshuffled into a stronger pattern, Livingstone ? If he is
to survive for us today, it will not be as Tusitala or the
rather absurd lover collapsing at Monterrey or the dandy
of Davos, but as the tired disheartened writer of the last
eight years, pegging desperately away at what he failed to
recognize as his masterworks.

Miss Cooper in her short biography* has followed con-
ventionally the well-worn tracks which James noticed
had been laid carefully by the hero himself. ‘ Stevenson
never covered his tracks,’ James wrote. ‘We follow them
here, from year to year and from stage to stage, with the
same charmed sense with which he has made us follow
some hunted hero in the heather.’ As an interpreter of his
work she is incomparably less sensitive than Miss Janet
Adam Smith who has already written to my mind the best
possible book on Stevenson of this length. One cannot
really dismiss The Wrong Box as c a tour de force some-
times enlivened by a faintly ghoulish humour, but with
no breath of reality in the characters and criticism such
as this (Miss Cooper is dealing with The Master of

* Robert Louis Stevenson , by Lettice Cooper.

8o

FROM FEATHERS TO IRON

Ballantrae) has too much of the common touch even for a
popular series: ‘The reader feels Henry’s unhappiness,
even when he finds it difficult to care very much about
Henry, who is, it must be confessed, a dull dog.’ Of The
Ebb Tide the ignorant reader will learn only that it is ‘a
grim study of shady characters in the South Seas’.

However, here for those who want it (though insuf-
ficiently charted with dates) is the obvious trail: we can
watch Stevenson scatter his scraps of paper across the
clearings for his pursuers to spy. His immense correspon-
dence was mainly written with an eye on his pursuers —
he encouraged Colvin to arrange it for publication. Miss
Emily Dickinson wrote with some lack of wisdom in one
of her poems, T like a look of agony because I know it’s
true’, but we are never, before the last years, quite sure of
the agony. Compare his Davos letters — ‘Here a sheer
hulk lies poor Tom Bowling and aspires, yes, C.B., with
tears after the past’ or doing his courageous act, ‘I am
better. I begin to hope that I may, if not outlive this
wolverine on my shoulder, at least carry him bravely’,
with the letters of his last year (for suffering like literature
has its juvenilia — men mature and graduate in suffering) :

‘The truth is I am nearly useless at literature, and I
will ask you to spare St Ives when it goes to you. . . . No
toil has been spared over the ungrateful canvas: and it
will not come together, and I must live, and my family.
Were it not for my health, which made it impossible, I
could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did
not stick to an honest commonplace trade when I was
young, which might have now supported me during these
ill years. ... It was a very little dose of inspiration, and a
pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most

81

6 — C.E.G.G.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

heroic industry. So far I have managed to please the
journalists. But I am a fictitious article and have long
known it. 5

A month before this he had written to his friend
Baxter, admitting his life-long attempt to turn ‘Bald
Conduct’ into an emotional religion and comparing with
the dreariness of his own creed the new spirit of the
anarchists in Europe, men who ‘commit dastardly mur-
ders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters
behind ’em . . . people whose conduct is inexplicable to
me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most’.
* Si vieillesse pouvait\ he quoted, while Colvin supplied
the asterisks. He was on the eve of Weir: the old trim
surface was cracking up : the granite was coming painfully
through. It is at that point, where the spade strikes the
edge of the stone, that the biographer should begin to dig.

1948

82

[ 2 ]

FIELDING AND STERNE

Ally ally of a piece throughout:

Thy Chase had a Beast in View ;

Thy Wars brought nothing about ;

Thy Lovers were all untrue.

y Tis well an Old Age is outy
And time to begin a New .

S o Dryden, looking back from the turn of the century on
the muddle of hopes and disappointments, revolution
and counter-revolution, and revolution again. The age
had been kept busily spinning, but to the poet in
1700 it seemed to have amounted to little: what
Cromwell had overthrown, Charles had rebuilt: what
James would have established, William had destroyed.
But literature may thrive on political disturbance, if
the disturbance goes deep enough and arouses a suffici-
ently passionate agreement or denial. One remembers
Trotsky’s account of the first meeting of the Soviet after
the October days of 1917: ‘Among their number were
completely grey soldiers, shell-shocked as it were by the
insurrection, and still hardly in control of their tongues.
But they were just the ones who found the words which
no orator could find. That was one of the most moving
scenes of the revolution, now first feeling its power, feel-
ing the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal
tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart
at the thought of the morrow which is to be more beauti-
ful than today.’

These terms can be transposed to fit the seventeenth
century as they cannot to fit the eighteenth, the century
to which Fielding was bom in 1707 and Steme six years
later. Bunyan, Fox, the Quakers, and Levellers, those

83

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

were the grey, the shell-shocked soldiers who found the
words which no official orator of the Established Church
could find, and one cannot question among some of the
poets who welcomed the return of Charles a genuine
thankfulness for a morrow which they believed was to be
still more beautiful. The great figure of Dryden compri-
ses the whole of the late seventeenth-century scene: like
some infinitely subtle meteorological instrument, he was
open to every wind: he registered the triumph of Crom-
well, the hopes of the Restoration, the Catholicism of
James, the final disillusionment. When he died, in 1700,
he left the new age, the quieter, more rational age,
curiously empty. Not until the romantics at the end of
the century was politics again to be of importance to the
creative, the recording mind, not until Newman and
Hopkins orthodox religion. All that was left was the
personal sensibility or the superficial social panorama,
from the highwayman in the cart and the debtor in gaol
to the lascivious lord at Vauxhall and the virtuous
heroine bent over the admirable, unenthusiastic works of
Bishop Burnet.

One cannot separate literature and life. If an age ap-
pears creatively, poetically, empty, it is fair to assume
that life too had its emptiness, was carried on at a lower,
less passionate level. I use the word poetry in the widest
sense, in the sense that Henry James was a poet and
Defoe was not. When Fielding published his first novel,
Joseph Andrews , in 1742, Swift was on the verge of death
and Pope as well, Cowper was ten years old and Blake
unborn. Dramatic poetry, which had survived Dryden’s
death only in such feeble hands as Addison’s and Rowe’s,
was to all intents a finished form.

But ficdon is one of the prime needs of human nature,

84

FIELDING AND STERNE

and someone in that empty world had got to begin build-
ing again. One cannot in such a period expect the greatest
literature: the old forms are seen to be old when the fine
excitement is over, and all that the best minds can do is to
construct new forms in which the poetic imagination may
eventually find itself a home. Something in the eighteenth
century had got to take the place of dramatic poetry (per-
haps it is not too fanciful to see in the innumerable trans-
lations of Homer, Virgil, Lucan a popular hunger for the
lost poetic fiction), and it was Fielding who for the first
time since the Elizabethan age directed the poetic imagi-
nation into prose fiction. That he began as a parodist of
Richardson may indicate that he recognized the inade-
quacy of Pamela , of the epistolary novel, to satisfy the
hunger of the age.

In the previous century the distinction between prose
fiction and poetic fiction had been a very simple one : one
might almost say that prose fiction had been porno-
graphic fiction, in the sense that it had been confined to a
more or less flippant study of sexual relations (whether
you take the plays of Wycherley, the prose comedies of
Dryden, the novels of Aphra Behn, the huge picaresque
novel of Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, the
generalization remains true almost without exception),
while poetic fiction had meant heroic drama, a distinction
underlined in plays like Marriage a la Mode which con-
tained both poetry and prose — the heroic and the porno-
graphic. Nowhere during the Restoration period, except
perhaps in Cowley’s great comedy, does one find prose
used in fiction as Webster and other Jacobean play-
wrights used it, as a medium of equal dignity and inten-
sity to poetry, indeed as poetry with the rhythm of
ordinary speech. It was from the traditional ideal of

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prose fiction that Defoe’s novels were derived: Moll
Flanders is only a more concise English Rogue, and it was
left to Fielding, who had not himself the poetic mind (he
declared roundly: ‘I should have honoured and loved
Homer more had he written a true history of his own
times in humble prose’), to construct a fictional form
which could attract the poetic imagination. Tom Jones
was to prove the archetype not only of the picaresque
novelists. James and Joyce owe as much to it as Dickens.

Today, when we have seen in the novels of Henry
James the metaphysical poet working in the medium of
prose fiction, in Lawrence’s and Conrad’s novels the
romantic, we cannot easily realize the revolutionary
nature of Tom Jones and Amelia. Sterne who came later —
the first volumes of Tristram Shandy were published five
years after Fielding’s death — bears so much more the
obvious marks of a revolutionary, simply because he
remains, in essentials, a revolutionary still. Even today he
continues magnificently to upset all our notions of what
a novel’s form should be; it is his least valuable qualities
which have been passed on. His sensibility founded a
whole school of Bages and Bancrofts and Blowers (I can-
not remember who it was who wrote: ‘Great G — d, un-
less I have greatly offended Thee, grant me the luxury
sometimes to slip a bit of silver, though no bigger than a
shilling, into the clammy-cold hand of the decayed wife
of a baronet’, but it was to the author of the Sentimental
Journey that he owed his sensibility), while his whimsi-
cality was inherited by the essayists, by Lamb in particu-
lar. But his form no one has ever tried to imitate, for what
would be the good ? An imitation could do nothing but
recall the original. Tristram Shandy exists, a lovely sterile
eccentricity, the last word in literary egotism. Even the

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FIELDING AND STERNE

fact that Sterne was — sometimes — a poet is less impor-
tant to practitioners of his art than that Fielding — some-
times — tried to be one.

Sterne, the sly, uneasy, unhappily married cleric, the
son of an elderly ensign who never had the means or the
influence to buy promotion, had suffered so many
humiliations from the world that he had to erect defences
of sentiment and of small indecencies between him and it
(he admired Rabelais, but how timidly, how ‘naughtily
his chapter on Noses reflects the author of The Heroic
Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel ), so that he had
nothing to offer us on our side of the barrier but his
genius, his genius for expressing the personal emotions of
the sly, uneasy, the unhappily married. The appalling
conceit of this genius, one protests, who claimed
Posterity for his book without troubling himself a hang
over the value of its contents: c for what has this book
done more than the Legation of Moses, or The Tale of a
Tub, that it may not swim down the gutter of Time along
with them?’ The nearest that this shrinking sentimental
man came to the ordinary run of life was Hall- Stevenson’s
pornographic circle, the nearest to passion his journals to
Eliza who was safely separated from him by the Indian
Ocean as well as by the difference in their years. There is
nothing he can tell us about anyone, we feel, but himself,
and that self has been so tidied and idealized that it would
be unrecognizable, one imagines, to his wife.

Compare his position in the life of his time with that of
Fielding, Fielding the rake. Fielding the country gentle-
man, Fielding the hack dramatist, and finally Fielding the
Westminster magistrate who knew all the outcast side of
life, from the thief and the cut-throat to the seedy genteel
and the half-pay officer in the debtor’s court, as no other

8?

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

man of his time. Compare the careful architecture of Tom
Jones : the introductory essays which enable the author
to put his point of view and to leave the characters to go
their way untainted by the uncharacteristic moralizing of
Defoe’s ; the introduction of parody in the same way and
for the same purpose as Joyce’s in Ulysses ; the in-
numerable sub-plots which give the book the proportions
of life, the personal story of Jones taking its place in the
general orchestration; the movement back and forth in
time as the characters meet each other and recount the
past in much the same way as Conrad’s, a craftsman’s
bluff by which we seem to get a glimpse of that ‘dark
backward and abysm’ that challenges the ingenuity of
every novelist. Compare all this careful architecture with
the schoolboy squibs — the blank, the blackened, and the
marbled leaves, the asterisks — of Tristram Shandy . We
cannot help but feel ungrateful when we think of the
work that Fielding put into his books, the importance of
his technical innovations, and realize that Sterne, who
contributed nothing, can still give more pleasure because
of what we call his genius, his skill at self-portraiture
(even Uncle Toby is only another example of his colossal
egotism : the only outside character he ever really drew —
and all the time we are aware of the author preening him-
self at the tender insight of his admiration).

The man Sterne is unbearable, even the emotions he
displayed with such amazing mastery were cheap
emotions. Dryden is dead: the great days are over:
Cavaliers and Roundheads have become Whigs and
Tories; Cumberland has slaughtered the Stuart hopes at
Culloden: the whole age cannot produce a respectable
passion. So anyone must feel to whom the change, say,
from the essays of Bacon and his true descendent Cowley

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FIELDING AND STERNE

to the essays of Lamb is a change for the worse in human
dignity : a change from ‘ Revenge is a kind of wild justice 5
or 4 It was the Funeral day of the late man who made him-
self to be called Protector 5 to ‘I have no ear — Mistake me
not, reader — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of
those exterior twin appendages or hanging ornaments . .
or to the latest little weekly essay on ‘Rising Early 5 or on
‘Losing a Collar Stud 5 . The personal emotion, personal
sensibility, the whim, in Sterne's day crept into our
literature. It is impossible not to feel a faint disgust at
this man, officially a man of God, who in the Sentimental
Journey found in his own tearful reaction to the mad girl
of Moulines the satisfactory conclusion: ‘I am positive I
have a soul ; nor can all the books with which materialists
have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary . 5

It is a little galling to find the conceit of such a man
justified. However much we hate the man, or hate rather
his coy whimsical defences, he is more ‘readable 5 than
Fielding by virtue of that most musical style, the day-
dream conversation of a man with a stutter in a world of
his imagination where tongue and teeth have no prob-
lems to overcome, where no syllables are harsh, where
mind speaks softly to mind with infinite subtlety of tone.
‘ The various accidents which befell a very worthy couple,
after their uniting in the state of matrimony, will be the
subject of the following history. The distresses which
they waded through were some of them so exquisite,
and the incidents which produced them so extraordinary
that they seem to require not only the utmost malice, but
the utmost invention which superstition hath ever at-
tributed to Fortune . 5 So Fielding begins his most mature
— if not his greatest — novel. How this book, one wants to
protest, should appeal to the craftsman: the tour de force

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with which for half the long novel he unfolds the story of
Booth and Amelia without abandoning the absolute unity
of his scene, the prison where Booth is confined. It is
quite as remarkable as the designed confusion of Tristram
Shandy , but there is no answer to a reader who replies:
‘I read to be entertained and how heavily this style of
Fielding’s weighs beside Sterne’s impudent opening: “I
wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of
them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had
minded what they were about when they begot me . . ’

No, one must surrender to Sterne most of the graces.
What Fielding possessed, and Sterne did not, was some-
thing quite as new to the novel as Sterne’s lightness and
sensibility, moral seriousness. He was not a poet — and
Sterne was at any rate a minor one — but this moral
seriousness enabled him to construct a form which would
later satisfy the requirements of major poets as Defoe’s
plain narrative could not. When we admire Tom Jones as
being the first portrait of c a whole man’ (a description
which perhaps fits only Bloom in later fiction), it is Field-
ing’s seriousness to which we are paying tribute, his
power of discriminating between immorality and vice.
He had no high opinion of human nature: the small
sensualities of Tom Jones, the incorrigible propensities
of Booth, his own direct statement, when he heard his
poor dying body, ugly with the dropsy, mocked by the
watermen at Rotherhithe (‘it was a lively picture of that
cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I
have often contemplated with concern, and which leads
the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melan-
choly thoughts’), prove it no more certainly than his
quite incredible pictures of virtue, the rectitude of Mr
Allworthy, the heroic nature of the patient Amelia. Ex-

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FIELDING AND STERNE

perience had supplied him with many a Booth and Tom
Jones (indeed someone of the latter name appeared before
him at Bow Street), but for examples of virtue he had to
call on his imagination, and one cannot agree with Saints-
bury who remarked quaintly and uncritically of his
heroines: ‘There is no more touching portrait in the
whole of fiction than this heroic and immortal one of
feminine goodness and forbearance. 5

It is impossible to use these immoderate terms of
Fielding without absurdity : to compare the kept woman.
Miss Mathews, in Amelia , as Dobson did, with a charac-
ter of Balzac’s. He belonged to the wrong century for this
kind of greatness. His heroic characters are derived from
Dryden — unsuccessfully (the relation between Amelia
and a character like Almeyda is obvious). But what puts
us so supremely in his debt is this : that he had gathered
up in his novels the two divided strands of Restoration
fiction: he had combined on his own lower level the flip-
pant prose fictions of the dramatists and the heroic drama
of the poets.

On the lower, the unreligious level. His virtues are
natural virtues, his despair a natural despair, endured
with as much courage as Dryden’s but without the super-
natural reason.

Brutus and Cato might discharge their Souls>

And give them Furious for another World;

But we like Gentries are oblig'd to stand
In Starless Nights , and wait tV appointed hour .

So Dryden, and here more lovably perhaps, with purely
natural virtue, Fielding faces death — death in the shape
of a last hard piece of work for public order, undertaken
in his final sickness with the intention of winning from

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the government some pension for his wife and children:
‘And though I disclaim all pretence to that Spartan or
Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it
was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the
public good I do solemnly declare I have that love for my
family. 5

He hated iniquity and he certainly died in exile: his
books do represent a moral struggle, but they completely
lack the sense of supernatural evil or supernatural good.
Mr Eliot has suggested that ‘with the disappearance of
the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the
idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings pre-
sented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction . . . tend
to become less and less real’, and it is the intensity of the
struggle which is lacking in Fielding. Evil is always a
purely sexual matter: the struggle seems invariably to
take the form of whether or not the ‘noble lord 9 or
colonel James will succeed in raping or seducing Amelia,
and the characters in this superficial struggle, carried out
with quite as much ingenuity as Uncle Toby employed
on his fortifications, do tend to become less and less real.
How can one take seriously Mrs Heartfree’s five escapes
from ravishment in twenty pages ? One can only say in
favour of this conception that it is at least expressed with
more dignity than in the Sentimental Journey where
Sterne himself has stolen the part of Pamela, of Amelia,
and Mrs Heartfree, and asks us to be breathlessly con-
cerned for Ms virtue (‘The foot of the bed was within a
yard and a half of the place where we were standing — I
had still hold of her hands — and how it happened I can
give no account, but I neither ask’d her — nor drew her —
nor did I think of the bed — 9 ). But the moral life in
Fielding is apt to resemble one of those pictorial games of

9 *

FIELDING AND STERNE

Snakes and Ladders. If the player’s counter should hap-
pen to fall on a Masquerade or a ticket to Vauxhall
Gardens, down it slides by way of the longest snake.

It would be ungrateful to end on this carping note.
There had been picaresque novels before Fielding — from
the days of Nashe to the days of Defoe — but the picar-
esque had not before in English been raised to an art,
given the form, the arrangement, which separates art from
mere realistic reporting however vivid. Fielding lifted life
out of its setting and arranged it for the delight of all who
love symmetry. He can afford to leave Sterne his graceful
play with the emotions, his amusing little indecencies : the
man who created Partridge had a distant kinship to the
creator of Falstaff. "Nothing’, Jones remarks, "can be
more likely to happen than death to men who go into
battle. Perhaps we shall both fall in it — and what then ?’
"What then?’ replied Partridge; "why then there is an
end of us, is there not ? When I am gone, all is over with
me. What matters the cause to me, or who gets the
victory, if I am killed ? I shall never enjoy any advantage
from it. What are all the ringing of bells, and bonfires, to
one that is six foot under ground ? there will be an end of
poor Partridge.’

Fielding had tried to make the novel poetic, even
though he himself had not the poetic mind, only a fair, a
generous mind and a courageous mind, and the conven-
tions which he established for the novel enabled it in a
more passionate age to become a poetic art, to fill the gap
in literature left when Dryden died and the seventeenth
century was over. He was the best product of his age,
the post-revolutionary age when politics for the first time
ceased to represent any deep issues and religion excited
only the shallowest feeling. His material was underpaid

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

officers, highwaymen, debtors, noblemen who had
nothing better to do than pursue sexual adventures,
clergymen like Parson Adams whose virtues are as much
pagan as Christian. "At the moment when one writes,’ to
quote Mr Eliot again, c one is what one is, and the damage
of a lifetime . . . cannot be repaired at the moment of
composition.’ We should not complain; rather we should
be amazed at what so unpoetic a mind accomplished in
such an age.

1937

SERVANTS OF THE NOVEL

Robert Bage, Edward Bancroft, Elizabeth Blower —
like the names on country tombs they are deeply forgot-
ten, but now a new scroll has been beautifully cut for
them. They deserve their new memorial, for they held the
fort. When Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne
were dead, these kept their public ready for Jane Austen
and Scott. Without a novel-reading public, Scott would
have remained an inferior poet, and even the self-
sufficient and solitary genius of Jane Austen owed a debt
to the innumerable female novelists of this dead period,
who persuaded the critics that it was respectable for a
woman to write.

‘There was, in the period that followed the master-
pieces of the four great novelists, a real conviction that
the novel was played out.’ Miss Tompkins* might be
referring to the 1930s as easily as to the 1770s. We, too,
have our four great dead. Hardy and Lawrence, James
and Conrad, and Miss Tompkins’s sketch of the novel
market bears many resemblances to the noisier modem
trade. In the 1770s new editions were faked, being an-
nounced long before the first had been sold, a method of
advertisement with a familiar ring. To give them a longer
life books were post-dated (a custom adopted to-day by
women’s magazines); reviewers complained of the flood
of novels and were abused in their turn for high-handed-
ness ; there were schoolboy novelists ; and women, always
women, writing with ‘a dry intolerance of phrase’, ‘an
irritated fastidiousness’.

‘Dead books’, Miss Tompkins remarks in her preface
‘can provide little information when exposed on the gib-
bet of scorn.’ It would have been too easy to guy the

* The Popular Novel in England , 1770-1800, J. M. S. Tompkins.

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

novel of sensibility with its voluptuous enjoyment of
charity or the Gothic romance; it is far more valuable to
discover the aim of the author. The popular writer of to-
day will be fortunate if in a hundred and fifty years he is
disinterred by a critic so sensitive to shades of intention,
who responds so quickly to the faintest sign of originality,
cutting away from the dead the quick wood, the "real
things seen and heard, dresses and street-cries and smoking
puddings and the talk of the servants’ hall ’ ; who is alive in
Charles Jenner to the first lyric quickening of prose when a
character tells how, as a boy of nineteen, he was drowsing
all night in a dark stage coach and at last opened the
wooden shutter to see if it was light : ‘ I had better have
left it alone; it was light; and by that light I saw over
against me a face, which several years’ experience of its
deceit has hardly been able to reconcile me to consigning
to oblivion.’

There are passages in Miss Tompkins’s chapter on
‘Theory and Technique’ which should modify the criti-
cism of the novel. She is discussing the accepted view
that the novel of her period suffered from laxity of
structure.

‘It is abundantly clear that careful articulation of plot
and due regard for proportion, even in a simple story,
were not among the principles of composition current in
the ’seventies and ’eighties. But principles of composition
there must have been ; and we shall appreciate them more
easily if, remembering the Sentimental Journey and the
Man of Feeling, we discard the term structure, with its
architectural suggestions, and think of these books rather
in terms of colour. What their authors aimed at — at least
the best of them — was delicacy and variety of emotional

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SERVANTS OF THE NOVEL

hue. The novel was to be a sort of artificial rainbow,
woven of tears and glinting sunshine, but allowing, at
times, of more violent contrasts , 5

This was the excuse for the episode unconnected with
the main plot and for the apparently unnecessary
character.

A technical device is practised by the novelist half-
consciously a long while before the critic analyses it.
Henry James did not invent the c point of view 5 , but his
prefaces gave the method a general importance it lacked
as long as it was practised unconsciously. No novelist
now can fail to take the "point of view 5 into account. For
this reason Miss Tompkins’s study of eighteenth-century
technique is of far wider importance than the novelists
she discusses.

1932

7 — C.E.G.G.

97

ROMANCE IN PIMLICO

This entertaining volume* is a by-product of the
author’s reading while she was engaged on her fascinating
study, The Popular Novel in England , and the reviewer
who criticizes it can only do so on material supplied him
by Dr Tompkins, for I doubt if there is any other living
authority on the Bristol Milkwoman, Dr Downman, the
author of Infancy , a poem published with the wish "that
even in hostile America mothers might be the better for
his advice’, Mary Hays, Philosophess, James White, the
author of burlesque mediaeval romances, the Griffiths
who publicized their happy marriage with the reckless
confidence of modem film-stars, and, best of all to my
mind, the ingenuous and disreputable author of The
Scotch Parents . For once the reviewer is also the general
reader, and as a general reader let us leave behind all
nonsense about literary influences and the like and con-
sider a character — John Ramble, whom we should
certainly have never encountered without Dr Tompkins’s
aid, and his cunning, emotional and heartless pursuit of
Nell Macpherson, a milliner’s apprentice.

The most fascinating feature of this autobiographical
novel— written apparently with the idea of blackmailing
Nell’s stubborn parents into returning his mistress whom
they had rather roughly taken from him — is a pink rib-
bon. Nell gave him this to tie round his guitar, and in a
fit of Jealousy he removed it and substituted a white one,
"which hung over Nell’, in Dr Tompkins’s words, "like
a sign of wrath and estrangement, to be removed only by
an abasement of devotion’. How we keep our eyes on
that guitar! "When will the ribbon be changed ? how far

* The PoUte Marriage and Other 18th Century Essays . J. M. S.
Tompkins.

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ROMANCE IN PIMLICO

must she go?’ The answer is — a very long way; every
man in that rational and rather lubricious age felt that he
had a right to life, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness.
An Act and Deed signed and dated by Nell guaranteed
Ramble’s sole possession of her body: but the white
ribbon remained on the guitar. One day, overcome by a
violent fit of toothache when he was walking with Nell,
Ramble sought an inn. c There was a bed in the room. . . .
Situations at times are so critical that it is not in the power
of us mortals to resist. ’ Nevertheless the pink ribbon was
not restored, and as the suspense grows the ribbons be-
come identified in our mind with the black and the white
sails for which Tristram waited; but this is life —
grotesque and comic — not fiction. The ribbon remained
white even after her attempted suicide in the Serpentine,
after she had scalded her hand to prove the resolution of
her love, and after she had borne unflinchingly his
murderous assault with a tea knife. Only when she had
deserted her parents and deceived her mother did the
white ribbon give place to the pink. C I made her no
answer, but got up directly, and then put the exiled
ribbon on my guitar, and showing it to her, I said, look
here. — Y ou remember the token.’ But they didn’t marry :
as Ramble put it to Mrs Macpherson, "Call to mind the
delicacy of marrying a Girl too soon after the loss of her
honour.’ There is an odd realistic charm about this trans-
parent romance : it emerges from the vivid and surprising
"properties’ — toothache and Hyde Park, the Serpentine
and Pimlico and the pink ribbon and a kettle of boiling
water, Nell’s uncle called McClack who was too much
for not very brave Ramble, and a poor relation called Mrs
Drulin; and like most of the romances in this book it is
conveyed to us by Dr Tompkins with elegance and wit.

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Indeed we have so much reason for gratitude that it
seems surly to complain that the volume has longueurs ;
that there are occasions when Dr Tompkins seems to take
a little too seriously the literary interest of the Bristol
Milkwoman or Mary Hays. She puts as her epigraph a
rather unwise remark of G. K. Chesterton* ‘ It is too often
forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man* so
a bad poet is nevertheless a poet’* and sometimes her
investigation of these obscure works becomes too whimsi-
cal-serious. The real interest in the bad poet is not
literary but psychological — the twist in Dr Downman’s
character which induced him to put into blank verse his
advice to mothers on "rickets, regular meals and a fruit
diet’* and we feel Dr Tompkins has struck a wrong note
when she observes: "A nerve thrilled in him. He has
directness of attack — a resonant simplicity in the opening
line of a poem* that recalls Sidney . 5 And occasionally she
is guilty of such a phrase as "Downman zealously invert-
ing the garden-mould with his new-found strength . 5 It is
as though she had been temporarily possessed by her
curious by-way writers* with their strenuous euphuism —
she will really have to be careful of Ramble.

1938

100

THE YOUNG DICKENS

A critic must try to avoid being a prisoner of his time,
and if we are to appreciate Oliver Twist at its full value
we must forget that long shelf-load of books, all the
stifling importance of a great author, the scandals and the
controversies of the private life ; it would be well too if we
could forget the Phiz and the Cruikshank illustrations
that have frozen the excited, excitable world of Dickens
into a hall of waxworks, where Mr Mantalini’s whiskers
have always the same trim, where Mr Pickwick perpetu-
ally turns up the tails of his coat, and in the Chamber of
Horrors Fagin crouches over an undying fire. His illus-
trators, brilliant craftsmen though they were, did Dickens
a disservice, for no character any more will walk for the
first time into our memory as we ourselves imagine him
and our imagination after all has just as much claim to
truth as Cruikshank’s.

Nevertheless the effort to go back is well worth while.
The journey is only a little more than a hundred years
long, and at the other end of the road is a young author
whose sole claim to renown in 1 836 had been the publica-
tion of some journalistic sketches and a number of comic
operettas : The Strange Gentleman , The Village Coquette ,
Is She His Wife ? I doubt whether any literary Cortez at
that date would have yet stood them upon his shelves.
Then suddenly with The Pickwick Papers came popularity
and fame. Fame falls like a dead hand on an author’s
shoulder, and it is well for him when it falls only in later
life. How many in Dickens’s place would have withstood
what James called ‘the great corrupting contact of the
public’, the popularity founded, as it almost always is, on
the weakness and not the strength of an author ?

The young Dickens, at the age of twenty-five, had hit

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on a mine that paid him a tremendous dividend. Fielding
and Smollett, tidied and refined for the new industrial
bourgeoisie, had both salted it; Goldsmith had contribu-
ted sentimentality and Monk Lewis horror. The book
was enormous, shapeless, familiar (that important recipe
for popularity). What Henry James wrote of a long-
forgotten French critic applies well to the young Dickens :
c He is homely, familiar and colloquial; he leans his
elbows on his desk and does up his weekly budget into a
parcel the reverse of compact. You can fancy him a grocer
retailing tapioca and hominy full weight for the price;
his style seems a sort of integument of brown paper. 5

This is, of course, unfair to The Pickwick Papers. The
driest critic could not have quite blinkered his eyes to
those sudden wide illuminations of comic genius that flap
across the waste of words like sheet lightning, but could
he have foreseen the second novel, not a repetition of this
great loose popular holdall, but a short melodrama, tight
in construction, almost entirely lacking in broad comedy,
and possessing only the sad twisted humour of the
orphan’s asylum ?

£ “You’ll make your fortune, Mr Sowerberry,” said
the beadle, as he thrust his thumb and forefinger into the
proffered snuff-box of the undertaker: which was an
ingenious little model of a patent coffin.’

Such a development was as inconceivable as the grad-
ual transformation of that thick boggy prose into the
delicate and exact poetic cadences, the music of memory,
that so influenced Proust.

We are too inclined to take Dickens as a whole and to
treat his juvenilia with the same kindness or harshness as
his later work. Oliver Twist is still juvenilia — magnificent

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THE YOUNG DICKENS

juvenilia: it is the first step on the road that led from
Pickwick to Great Expectations , and we condone the faults
of taste in the early book the more readily if we recognize
the distance Dickens had to travel. These two typical
didactic passages can act as the first two milestones at the
opening of the journey, the first from Pickwick , the
second from Oliver Twist .

c And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christ-
mas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment.
How many families, whose members have been dispersed
and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life,
are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state
of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source
of such pure and unalloyed delight, and one so incom-
patible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the
religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude
traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among
the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided
for the blest and happy.’

‘The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though
these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some
pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never
known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of
water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the
mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden
dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life;
which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of
a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have
awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can
ever recall/

The first is certainly brown paper: what it wraps has
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been chosen by the grocer to suit his clients’ tastes, but
cannot we detect already in the second passage the tone
of Dickens’s secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking
to itself with no one there to listen, as we find it in Great
Expectations ?

4 It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked
along, the times when I was a little helpless creature, and
my sister did not spare me, vividly returned. But they
returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even
the edge of Tickler, For now, the very breath of the beans
and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come
when it would be well for my memory that others walking
in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.’

It is a mistake to think of Oliver Twist as a realistic
story: only late in his career did Dickens learn to write
realistically of human beings; at the beginning he in-
vented life and we no more believe in the temporal ex-
istence of Fagin or Bill Sikes than we believe in the
existence of that Giant whom Jack slew as he bellowed
his Fee Fi Fo Fum. There were real Fagins and Bill Sikes
and real Bumbles in the England of his day, but he had
not drawn them, as he was later to draw the convict Mag-
witch; these characters in Oliver Twist are simply parts
of one huge invented scene, what Dickens in his own pre-
face called ‘the cold wet shelterless midnight streets of
London’. How the phrase goes echoing on through the
books of Dickens until we meet it again so many years
later in ‘the weary western streets of London on a cold
dusty spring night’ which were so melancholy to Pip.
But Pip was to be as real as the weary streets, while
Oliver was as unrealistic as the cold wet midnight of
which he formed a part.

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THE YOUNG DICKENS

This is not to criticize the book so much as to describe
it. For what an imagination this youth of twenty-six had
that he could invent so monstrous and complete a legend !
We are not lost with Oliver Twist round Saffron Hill:
we are lost in the interstices of one young, angry, gloomy
brain, and the oppressive images stand out along the
track like the lit figures in a Ghost Train tunnel.

‘Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long
row of elm boards cut into the same shape, looking in the
dim light, like high shouldered ghosts with their hands in
their breeches pockets. 5

We have most of us seen those nineteenth-century
prints where the bodies of naked women form the face
of a character, the Diplomat, the Miser, and the like. So
the crouching figure of Fagin seems to form the mouth,
Sikes with his bludgeon the jutting features, and the sad
lost Oliver the eyes of one man, as lost as Oliver.

Chesterton, in a fine imaginative passage, has described
the mystery behind Dickens’s plots, the sense that even
the author was unaware of what was really going on, so
that when the explanations come and we reach, huddled
into the last pages of Oliver Twisty a naked complex
narrative of illegitimacy and burnt wills and destroyed
evidence, we simply do not believe. ‘The secrecy is sen-
sational ; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems
more awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if these
grisly figures, Mrs Chadband and Mrs Clennam, Miss
Havisham and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were
keeping something back from the author as well as from
the reader. When the book closes we do not know their
real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with
something less terrible than the truth.’

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What strikes the attention most in this closed Fagin
universe are the different levels of unreality. If, as one is
inclined to believe, the creative writer perceives his
world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and
his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world
in terms of the great public world we all share, we can
understand why Fagin and Sikes in their most extreme
exaggerations move us more than the benevolence of Mr
Brownlow or the sweetness of Mrs Maylie — they touch
with fear as others never really touch with love. It was
not that the unhappy child, with his hurt pride and his
sense of hopeless insecurity, had not encountered human
goodness — he had simply failed to recognize it in those
streets between Gadshill and Hungerford Market which
had been as narrowly enclosed as Oliver Twist’s. When
Dickens at this early period tried to describe goodness he
seems to have remembered the small stationers’ shops on
the way to the blacking factory with their coloured paper
scraps of angels and virgins, or perhaps the face of some
old gentleman who had spoken kindly to him outside
Warren’s factory. He had swum up towards goodness
from the deepest world of his experience, and on this
shallow level the conscious brain has taken a hand, trying
to construct characters to represent virtue and, because his
age demanded it, triumphant virtue, but all he can produce
are powdered wigs and gleaming spectacles and a lot of
bustle with bowls of broth and a pale angelic face. Com-
pare the way in which we first meet evil with his introduc-
tion of goodness.

* The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black
with age and dirt. There was a deal table before the fire :
upon which were a candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle,

106

THE YOUNG DICKENS

two or three pewter pots, a loaf and butter, and a plate.
In a frying pan, which was on the fire, and which was
secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages
were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-
fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose
villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a
quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy
flannel gown, with his throat bare . . . “This is him,
Fagin,” said Jack Dawkins: “my friend Oliver Twist .’ 5
The Jew grinned ; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver,
took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the
honour of his intimate acquaintance.’

Fagin has always about him this quality of darkness
and nightmare. He never appears on the daylight streets.
Even when we see him last in the condemned cell, it is in
the hours before the dawn. In the Fagin darkness
Dickens’s hand seldom fumbles. Hear him turning the
screw of horror when Nancy speaks of the thoughts of
death that have haunted her:

‘ “Imagination,” said the gentleman, soothing her.

“No imagination,” replied the girl in a hoarse voice.
“ I’ll swear I saw "coffin’ written in every page of the book
in large black letters, — aye, and they carried one close to
me, in the streets tonight.”

“ There is nothing unusual in that,” said the gentleman.
“They have passed me often.”

“Real ones,” rejoined the girl. “This was not.” ’

Now turn to the daylight world and our first sight of Rose :

* The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and spring-
time of womanhood; at that age, when, if ever angels be

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they
may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as
hers. She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and
exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and
beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its
rough creatures her fit companions . 5

Or Mr Brownlow as he first appeared to Oliver:

‘Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be;
but he had no sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead,
and thrust his hands behind the skirts of his dressing-
gown to take a good long look at Oliver, than his coun-
tenance underwent a very great variety of odd contortions
. . . The fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr Brown-
low’s heart, being large enough for any six ordinary old
gentlemen of humane disposition, forced a supply of tears
into his eyes by some hydraulic process which we are not
sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain . 5

How can we really believe that these inadequate ghosts
of goodness can triumph over Fagin, Monks, and Sikes ?
And the answer, of course, is that they never could have
triumphed without the elaborate machinery of the plot
disclosed in the last pages. This world of Dickens is a
world without God ; and as a substitute for the power and
the glory of the omnipotent and omniscient are a few
sentimental references to heaven, angels, the sweet faces
of the dead, and Oliver saying, ‘ Heaven is a long way off,
and they are too happy there to come down to the bedside
of a poor boy . 5 In this Manichaean world we can believe
in evil-doing, but goodness wilts into philanthropy,
kindness, and those strange vague sicknesses into which

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THE YOUNG DICKENS

Dickens’s young women so frequently fall and which
seem in his eyes a kind of badge of virtue, as though there
were a merit in death.

But how instinctively Dickens’s genius recognized the
flaw and made a virtue out of it. We cannot believe in the
power of Mr Brownlow, but nor did Dickens, and from
his inability to believe in his own good character springs
the real tension of his novel. The boy Oliver may not
lodge in our brain like David Copperfield, and though
many of Mr Bumble’s phrases have become and deserve
to have become familiar quotations we can feel he was
manufactured: he never breathes like Mr Dorrit; yet
Oliver’s predicament, the nightmare fight between the
darkness, where the demons walk, and the sunlight, where
ineffective goodness makes its last stand in a condemned
world, will remain part of our imaginations forever. We
read of the defeat of Monks, and of Fagin screaming in
the condemned cell, and of Sikes dangling from his self-
made noose, but we don’t believe. We have witnessed
Oliver’s temporary escapes too often and his inevitable
recapture: there is the truth and the creative experience.
We know that when Oliver leaves Mr Brownlow’s house
to walk a few hundred yards to the bookseller, his friends
will wait in vain for his return. All London outside the
quiet shady street in Pentonville belongs to his pursuers;
and when he escapes again into the house of Mrs Mayiie
in the fields beyond Shepperton, we know his security is
false. The seasons may pass, but safety depends not on
time but on daylight. As children we all knew that: how
all day we could forget the dark and the journey to bed.
It is with a sense of relief that at last in twilight we see
the faces of the Jew and Monks peer into the cottage
window between the sprays of jessamine. At that moment

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we realize how the whole world, and not London only,
belongs to these two after dark. Dickens, dealing out his
happy endings and his unreal retributions, can never
ruin the validity and dignity of that moment. 'They had
recognized him, and he them ; and their look was as firmly
impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply
carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. 5

'From his birth 5 — Dickens may have intended that
phrase to refer to the complicated imbroglios of the plot
that lie outside the novel, 'something less terrible than
the truth 5 . As for the truth, is it too fantastic to imagine
that in this novel, as in many of his later books, creeps in,
unrecognized by the author, the eternal and alluring
taint of the Manichee, with its simple and terrible
explanation of our plight, how the world was made by
Satan and not by God, lulling us with the music of
despair?

1950

no

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the hardest stone, but it does not feel the pain your
fingers will feel. It has no heart and does not suffer the
pain and anguish you must feel.’

Andersen has been held up as an example of supreme
egotism, because everything which he and those he loved
suffered he related to his own future, wondering of his
family’s early bitter disappointment at a failure to find
a livelihood on a country estate whether God had not
ruined their hopes to save him from becoming a mere
farmer. But this was not egotism ; it was an artist’s parallel
to the Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a
spiritual benefit. If he had not found a reason to accept
pain, his mind might well have broken; he might have
been happy in the manner of his grandfather who
wandered singing and wreathed in flowers through the
streets of Odense or of his father who imagined himself
on his deathbed one of Napoleon’s captains, instead of
the broken private that he was, and cried aloud, ‘Hats off,
you whelps, when the Emperor rides by.’

His nerves, too, supplied what fate next demanded in
completing the artist — persistence, an inability to find
happiness even when he had won his fame. In Sweden,
when the students of Lund marched in a body to acclaim
him, he could not believe in their sincerity; he thought
they were making game of him and searched their faces
for smiles. When he left Odense for Copenhagen, at the
age of fourteen, without work or friends, a wise woman
had declared that one day his native place would be
illuminated in his honour, so that when, 48 years later, he
returned to receive the freedom of the city, it might have
been expected that he would enjoy a few moments of
unmixed happiness. But at night, as he watched from the
City Hall the torches and the lamps and the crowd sing-

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HANS ANDERSEN

ing in his honour in the square, the cold wind touched a
tooth into almost unbearable pain, so that he could only
count the verses still remaining and long for the pro-
gramme to end. It is impossible, at times, not to be con-
vinced of the actuality of this purposeful fate; for it was
an extraordinary coincidence, if it was not a malignant
providence, which caused him to overhear, as he stood at
his window in Copenhagen, just returned from his
triumphal visit to England, a man say to his companion :

£ Look, there is our orang-outang who is so famous abroad. 5

Most men have one earth into which they can creep to
rest the nerves, but for Andersen it was stopped. He was
deprived even of the satisfaction of sex. Again his life was
curiously of a piece, as if no opportunity was to be wasted
to warp his nature to the required shape. As a boy alone
in Copenhagen, chance found him lodgings in a street
of red lights. His surroundings must have continually
aroused desires which he had not the money to satisfy.
And they were never satisfied. He was as passionate as
most men, three times he tried to marry, but he retained
the exhausting innocence which, to quote Miss Toksvig,*
fi he described himself as the kind which reads the Bible
and always finds the Song of Songs; the innocence that
ruins sleep*.

There remained for fate to limit and define his range as
an artist. The son of a washerwoman and a cobbler
Andersen inherited the folk tradition; his earliest fairy
stories were transcripts of tales he had heard as a child.
Witches were part of his everyday life; they were called
in by his mother to foretell his future, to heal his father’s
sickness, and the little mediaeval court of Odense supplied
one of the commonest ingredients of his tales, the ease

* Ham Christian Andersen . By Signe Toksvig.

8— C.E.G.G* 1 13

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

with which a poor child can talk with royalty. Odense had
only 7,000 inhabitants, but it had a palace and a governor
and a regiment of dragoons, and the cobbler’s son was
admitted to audience. But Andersen did not submit easily
to the claims of this environment. It was his ambition to
be a dramatic poet; with extraordinary persistence he
followed this aim to the end of his life, and because his
plays almost invariably failed he was convinced that he
was not appreciated in his own country.

Miss Toksvig’s is a most satisfying biography of this
unhappy man in all his curious glassy transparency. She
writes with sympathy and without sentimentality, and it
is a pleasure to watch her masterly choice and arrange-
ment of incident into a story which is always exciting. One
can only wish that she had not confined herself to Ander-
sen’s life. She throws off suggestions for a new estimate
of his work, which I should like to have seen pursued. c In
Hans Christian,’ Miss Toksvig writes, 4 the Unconscious
was made flesh and dwelt unashamed and bewildered
among men,’ and perhaps the chief importance of Hans
Andersen today to adult readers lies in the frequency with
which he allowed his unconscious mind to take control of
his pen. There are passages in The Snow Queen which
anticipate the method of the Surrealistes. His contem-
poraries complained that his stories contained no moral,
but it is in their occasional passages of pure fantasy, as
when the flowers speak their irrelevant messages to
Gerda, that his stories have their greatest importance for
the contemporaries of M. Philippe Soupault.

[ 3 ]

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

After the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the
English novel; indeed long before his death one can
picture that quiet, impressive, rather complacent figure,
like the last survivor on a raft, gazing out over a sea
scattered with wreckage. He even recorded his impres-
sions in an article in The Times Literary Supplement , re-
corded his hope — but was it really hope or only a form of
his unconquerable oriental politeness ? — in such young
novelists as Mr Compton Mackenzie and Mr David
Herbert Lawrence, and we who have lived after the
disaster can realize the futility of those hopes.

For with the death of James the religious sense was lost
to the English novel, and with the religious sense went
the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as
if the world of fiction had lost a dimension: the characters
of such distinguished writers as Mrs Virginia Woolf and
Mr E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols
through a world that was paper-thin. Even in one of the
most materialistic of our great novelists — in Trollope —
we are aware of another world against which the actions
of the characters are thrown into relief. The ungainly
clergyman picking his black-booted way through the
mud, handling so awkwardly his umbrella, speaking of
his miserable income and stumbling through a proposal
of marriage, exists in a way that Mrs Woolf’s Mr Ramsay
never does, because we are aware that he exists not only
to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye.
His unimportance in the world of the senses is only
matched by his enormous importance in another world.

The novelist, perhaps unconsciously aware of his
predicament, took refuge in the subjective novel. It was

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

as if he thought that by mining into layers of personality
hitherto untouched he could unearth the secret of c im-
portance ? ? but in these mining operations he lost yet
another dimension. The visible world for him ceased to
exist as completely as the spiritual. Mrs Dalloway walking
down Regent Street was aware of the glitter of shop win-
dows, the smooth passage of cars, the conversation of
shoppers, but it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs
Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming
whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what
Regent Street had become: a current of air, a touch of
scent, a sparkle of glass. But, we protest. Regent Street
too has a right to exist ; it is more real than Mrs Dalloway,
and we look back with nostalgia towards the chop houses,
the mean courts, the still Sunday streets of Dickens.
Dickens’s characters were of immortal importance, and
the houses in which they loved, the mews in which they
damned themselves were lent importance by their
presence. They were given the right to exist as they were,
distorted, if at all, only by their observer’s eye — not further
distorted at a second remove by an imagined character.

M. Mauriac’s first importance to an English reader,
therefore, is that he belongs to the company of the great
traditional novelists : he is a writer for whom the visible
world has not ceased to exist, whose characters have the
solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose,
and a writer who claims the traditional and essential right
of a novelist, to comment, to express his views. For how
tired we have become of the dogmatically ‘pure’ novel,
the tradition founded by Flaubert and reaching its
magnificent tortuous climax in England in the works of
Henry James. One is reminded of those puzzles in
children’s papers which take the form of a maze. The

116

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

child is encouraged to trace with his pencil a path to the
centre of the maze. But in the pure novel the reader
begins at the centre and has to find his way to the gate.
He runs his pencil down avenues which must surely go
straight to the circumference, the world outside the maze,
where moral judgements and acts of supernatural im-
portance can be found (even the writing of a novel indeed
can be regarded as a more important action, expressing
an intention of more vital importance, than the adultery
of the main character or the murder in chapter three), but
the printed channels slip and twist and slide, landing him
back where he began, and he finds on close examination
that the designer of the maze has in fact overprinted the
only exit.

I am not denying the greatness of either Flaubert or
James. The novel was ceasing to be an aesthetic form and
they recalled it to the artistic conscience. It was the later
writers who by accepting the technical dogma blindly
made the novel the dull devitalized form (form it retained)
that it has become. The exclusion of the author can go
too far. Even the author, poor devil, has a right to exist,
and M. Mauriac reaffirms that right. It is true that the
Flaubertian form is not so completely abandoned in this
novel* as in Le Baiser au lepreux ; the T J of the story plays
a part in the action; any commentary there is can be
attributed by purists to this fictional 4 1 % but the pretence
is thin — c I * is dominated by I. Let me quote two passages :

e — Et puis, tellement beau, tu ne trouves pas ?

‘Non, je ne le trouvais pas beau. Qu’est-ce que la
beaute pour un enfant ? Sans doute, est-il surtout sensible
k la force, a la puissance. Mais cette question dut me

117

* La Pharisienne.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

frapper puisque je me souviens encore, apres toute une
vie, de cet endroit de Fallee oil Michele m’interrogea
ainsi, a propos de Jean. Saurais-je mieux definir aujour-
d’hui, ce que j’appelle beaute ? saurais-je dire a quel signe
je la reconnais, qu’il s’agisse d'un visage de chair, d’un
horizon, d’un del, d’une couleur, d’une parole, d’un
chant? A ce tressaillement charnel et qui, pourtant,
interesse Fame, a cette joie desesperee, a cette contempla-
tion sans issue et que ne recompense aucune etreinte . .

c Ce jour-la, j’ai vu pour la premiere fois a visage
decouvert, ma vieille ennemie la solitude, avec qui je fais
bon manage aujourd’hui. Nous nous connaissons: elle
m’a assene tous les coups imaginables, et il n’y a plus de
place oil frapper. Je ne crois avoir evite aucun de ses
pieges. Maintenant elle a fini de me torturer. Nous
tisonnons face a face, durant ces soirs d’hiver oil la chute
d’une “pigne”, un sanglot de nocturne ont autant d’inte-
ret pour mon coeur qu’une voix humaine.’

In such passages one is aware, as in Shakespeare’s
plays, of a sudden tensing, a hush seems to fall on the
spirit — this is something more important than the king,
Lear, or the general, Othello, something which is un-
confined and unconditioned by plot. has ceased to
speak, I is speaking.

One is never tempted to consider in detail M. Mau-
riac’s plots. Who can describe six months afterwards the
order of events, say in Ce qui etait perdu ? One remembers
the simple outlines of Le Baiser au lepreux> but the less
simple the events of the novel the more they disappear
from the mind, leaving in our memory only the characters,
whom we have known so intimately that the events at the
one period of their lives chosen by the novelist can be

118

FRANCOIS MAURIAC

forgotten without forgetting them. (The first lines of La
Pharisienne create completely the horrible Comte de
Mirbel : 4 “Approche id, garpon I” Je me retoumai, croyant
qu’il s’adressait a un de mes camarades. Mais non, c’etait
bien moi qu’appelait l’ancien zouave pontifical, souriant.
La cicatrice de sa levre superieure rendait le sourire
hideux.’) M. Mauriac’s characters exist with extraordin-
ary physical completeness (he has affinities here we feel to
Dickens), but their particular acts are less important than
the force, whether God or Devil, that compels them, and
though M. Mauriac rises to dramatic heights in his great
"scenes’, as when Jean de Mirbel, the boy whose soul
is in such danger (a kind of unhappy tortured Grand
Meaulnes), is the silent witness outside the country hotel
of his beloved mother’s vulgar adultery, the "joins ’ of his
plot, the events which should make a plausible progres-
sion from one scene to another, are often oddly lacking.
Described as plots his novels would sometimes seem to
flicker like an early film. But who would attempt to de-
scribe them as plots ? Wipe out the whole progression of
events and we would be left still with the characters in a
way I can compare with no other novelist. Take away Mrs
Dalloway’s capability of self-expression and there is not
merely no novel but no Mrs Dalloway: take away the
plot from Dickens and the characters who have lived so
vividly from event to event would dissolve. But if the
Comtesse de Mirbel had not committed adultery, if Jean’s
guardian, the evil Papal Zouave, had never lifted a hand
against him: if the clumsy well-meaning saintly priest,
the Abbe Calou, had never been put in charge of the
boy: the characters, we feel, would have continued to
exist in identically the same way. We are saved or damned
by our thoughts, not by our actions.

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

The events of M. Mauriac’s novels are used not to
change characters (how little in truth are we changed by
events : how romantic and false in comparison is a book
such as Conrad’s Lord Jim ) but to reveal characters —
reveal them gradually with an incomparable subtlety.
His moral and religious insight is the reverse of the
obvious: you will seldom find the easy false assumption,
the stock figure in M. Mauriac. Take for example the
poor pious usher M. Puybaraud. He is what we call in
England a creeping Jesus, but JVL Mauriac shows how
in truth the creeping Jesus may creep towards Jesus. La
Pharisienne herself under her layer of destructive egotism
and false pity is disclosed sympathetically to the religious
core. She learns through hypocrisy. The hypocrite can-
not live insulated for ever against the beliefs she professes.
There is irony but no satire in M. Mauriac’s work.

I am conscious of having scattered too many names and
comparisons in this short and superficial essay, but one
name — the greatest — cannot be left out of any considera-
tion of M. Mauriac’s work, Pascal. This modem novelist,
who allows himself the freedom to comment, comments,
whether through his characters or in his own ‘ I ’, again in
the very accents of Pascal.

‘Les etres ne changent pas, c’est la une verite dont on
ne doute plus a mon age; mais ils retoument souvent a
1’inclination que durant une vie ils se sont epuises a com-
battre. Ce qui ne signifie point qu’ils finissent toujours par
ceder au pire d’eux-memes : Dieu est la bonne tentation
a laquelle beaucoup d’hommes succombent a la fin.’

‘II y a des etres qui tendent leurs toiles et peuvent
jeuner longtemps avant qu’aucune proie s’y laisse pren-
dre: la patience du vice est infinie.’

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FRANCOIS MAURIAC

‘II ne faut pas essayer d’entrer dans la vie des etres
malgre eux: retiens cette le<;on, mon petit. H ne faut pas
pousser la porte de cette seconde ni de cette troisieme vie
que Dieu seul connait. II ne faut jamais toumer la tete
vers la ville secrete, vers la cite maudite des autres, si on
ne veut pas etre change en statue de sel . . .

‘Notre-Seigneur exige que nous aimions nos ennemis;
c’est plus facile souvent que de ne pas hair ceux que nous
aimons . 5

If Pascal had been a novelist, we feel, this is the method
and the tone he would have used.

1945

I2X

BERNANOS, THE BEGINNER

Sous Le Soldi de Satan , the first novel of Bemanos, is
stamped in deep wax with the very personal seal which
he never lost. Technically it is full of faults, faults many
of them that he never troubled to amend in his later
books. He was a writer rather than a novelist; in the
impatience and even the fury of his creation he seems to
have snatched at fiction because it was nearest to his
hand. He belongs in the company of Leon Bloy rather
than of Frangois Mauriac, who has patiently through the
years pruned and perfected his style and learned his
method. Bemanos belongs to the world of angry men, to
a tradition of religious writing that stretches back to
Dante, ‘who loved well because he hated’.

Bloy wrote in an essay on the Danish writer Joergen-
sen, Tt will always be known that he wrote for the glory
of God . . . and I know it well, that terrible profession.’
Bemanos could have made the same claim. There is no
catharsis in his work; his stories are open wounds which
refuse, like the stigmata, to heal. The cure of Lumbres
dies standing upright in pain pressed against the back
wall of his confessional in the empty church where he is
discovered by the illustrious member of the Academie
Frangaise (like Bloy, Bemanos is ready to spit in the face
of his own profession, for literature only exists for him
as a means to an end: sanctification) :

* Toute belle vie , Seigneur, temoigne pour vous; mais le
temoigmge du saint est comtne arrache par lefer .

‘Telle fut sans doute, ici-bas, la plainte supreme du
cure de Lumbres, elevee vers le Juge, et son reproche
amoureux. Mais, a Thomme illustre qui l’est venu cher-
cher si loin, il a autre chose a dire. Et si la bouche noire.

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BERNANOS, THE BEGINNER

dans Pombre, qui ressemble a une plaie ouverte par
Pexplosion d’un dernier cri, ne profere aucun son, le
corps tout entier mime un afireux defi:

‘TU VOULAIS MA PAIX, S’SCRIE LE SAINT, VIENS LA
PRENDRE! . .

In this, his first novel, Bemanos too seems to cry
defiantly to ail the readers of the latest literary prizes, to
the readers of feuilletons, even to the avant-garde of his
own day, ‘Come and read me if you dare’, expecting no
more response than did the cure of Lumbres. What
astonishment he must have felt when he saw his great
world-wide audience assembling.

We mustn’t ignore his faults, because they were part
of the man, as much as the disordered clothes were part
of the cure when we meet him first through the critical
eyes of the Abbe Menou-Segrais:

‘Le desordre, ou plutot l’aspect presque sordide de
ses vetements joumaliers, etait rendu plus remarquable
encore par la singuliere opposition d’une douillette neuve,
raide d’appret, qu’il avait glissee avec tant d’emotion
qu’une des manches se retroussait risiblement sur un
poignet noueux comme un cep.’

The story, which is written in the form of three linking
nouvelles (the only form which Bemanos up till then had
tried) begins with the history of Mouchette, the country
girl seduced by the aristocratic landowner whom she
murders. Only in the second nouvelle do we encounter
the cure, who is tempted to despair by the diabolic
horse-dealer on his way to assist at a retreat in a neigh-
bouring parish and is afterwards concerned, to the public

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scandal, in the suicide of Mouchette. In the final nouvelle
he has been appointed, after a disciplinary period in a
monastery, to the parish of Lumbres, and like the Cure
d’Ars he is a saint accepted in his lifetime by all but him-
self— an object of pilgrimage, even to curious literary
men.

It is a weakness, I think, in the novel that it begins
with the story of Mouchette, a melodramatic nineteenth-
century plot even though seen through Bemanos’s time-
less eyes, and if we judge the book strictly as a novel, we
have to deplore the intrusions of the author who occa-
sionally mounts the pulpit to draw a lesson which we
would have preferred to discover for ourselves. There is
even a hint of old-fashioned hagiology :

4 C’etait Theure de la nuit oil cet homme intrepide,
soutien de tant d’ames, chancelait sous le poids de son
magnifique fardeau.’

Perhaps only in Journal (Tun Cure , where a stricter method
was imposed by his use of the first person, did Bemanos
allow his characters to speak for themselves without
explanation or annotation by the author. He never dis-
covered the cunning method of disguised commentary
employed by Mauriac who conceals the author’s voice in
a simile or an unexpected adjective, like a film director
who makes his personal comment with a camera angle.

And yet . . . are we, when all this has been said, only
trying to impose arbitrary laws which have no authority
higher than Flaubert’s ? Even what sometimes seem to
be clumsy or undramatized interventions by the author
are the very characteristics which give the story of the
cure of Lumbres its odd authenticity. It is as though

124

BERNANOS, THE BEGINNER

Bemanos were a biographer rather than a novelist. True
that on occasion he takes on the tone of a hagiographer,
but a work of hagiology has been written about a real
saint, and the very faults of Bemanos’s first novel become
virtues and authenticate the character of the cure — this
is not fiction, we tell ourselves: the cure exists in the
same historic world as the Cure d’ Ars and his parish with
him. Surely, just as at Ars, the pilgrims debouch in
Lumbres daily from their motor-coaches to examine the
rough confessional where the cure died.

And would we for the sake of a stricter discipline
sacrifice the pensees , like Mauriac’s not unworthy of
Pascal.

< II est naturel a l’homme de hair sa propre souffrance
dans la souffrance d’autrui. 5

‘Quand Phomme se leve pour le maudire, c’est Lui
seul qui soutient cette main debile. ’

‘ L’enfer aussi a ses cloitres.’

An author, when his greatness is accepted, loses a great
deal of his impact; he becomes the reading of the lycees,
part of a course in literature; he is taught and not en-
joyed. How I wish I could have been one of those who
read Sous Le Soldi de Satan for the first time when
it appeared in 1926. With what astonishment, in this
novel unlike all novels hitherto, they must have en-
countered le tueur d 7 antes when he intercepted the cure on
the dark road to Boulaincourt in the guise of a little
lubricious horse-dealer with his sinister gaiety and his
horrible affection and his grotesque playfulness.

This is surely one of the great scenes in literature, the

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

scenes which suddenly enlarge the whole scope of fiction
and like new discoveries in science alter the future and
correct the past. Never again will it be possible to write
off the infantile devils of Doctor Faustus with their fire-
crackers and conjuring tricks. They are more under-
standable now, masks of the horse-dealer who made his
own kind of Host with childish malice out of a pebble.
‘ Un jeu d'enfants he called it in proud mockery, for
infantility, if the inferno exists at all, must surely be a
mark of that Hell which is the home of the eternally
undeveloped.

1968

126

THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD

There are certain writers, as different as Dickens from
Kipling, who never shake off the burden of their child-
hood. The abandonment to the blacking factory in
Dickens’s case and in Kipling’s to the cruel Aunt Rosa
living in the sandy suburban road were never forgotten.
All later experience seems to have been related to those
months or years of unhappiness. Life which turns its
cruel side to most of us at an age when we have begun to
learn the arts of self-protection took these two writers by
surprise during the defencelessness of early childhood.
How differently they reacted. Dickens learnt sympathy,
Kipling cruelty — Dickens developed a style so easy and
natural that it seems capable of including the whole
human race in its understanding: Kipling designed a
machine, the cogwheels perfectly fashioned, for exclusion.
The characters sometimes seem to rattle down a con-
veyor-belt like matchboxes.

There are great similarities in the early life of Kipling
and Saki, and Saki’s reaction to misery was nearer Kip-
ling’s than Dickens’s. Kipling was bom in India. H. H.
Munro (I would like to drop that rather meaningless
mask of the pen name) in Burma. Family life for such
children is always broken — the miseries recorded by
Kipling and Munro must be experienced by many mute
inglorious children bom to the civil servant or the
colonial officer in the East: the arrival of the cab at the
strange relative’s house, the unpacking of the boxes, the
unfamiliar improvised nursery, the terrible departure of
the parents, a four years’ absence from affection that in
child-time can be as long as a generation (at four one is a
small child, at eight a boy). Kipling described the horror
of that time in * Baa Baa Black Sheep ’ — a story in spite of

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

its sentimentality almost unbearable to read : Aunt Rosa's
prayers, the beatings, the card with the word liar pin-
ned upon the back, the growing and neglected blindness,
until at last came the moment of rebellion.

4 “If you make me do that,” said Black Sheep very
quietly, 44 1 shall bum this house down and perhaps I will
kill you. I don't know whether I can kill you — you are so
bony, but I will try.”

4 No punishment followed this blasphemy, though
Black Sheep held himself ready to work his way to
Auntie Rosa's withered throat and grip there till he was
beaten off.'

In the last sentence we can hear something very much
like the tones of Munro’s voice as we hear them in one
of his finest stories Sredni Vashtar. Neither his Aunt
Augusta nor his Aunt Charlotte with whom he was left
near Barnstaple after his mother’s death, while his father
served in Burma, had the fiendish cruelty of Aunt Rosa,
but Augusta ( 4 a woman’, Munro’s sister wrote, 4 of un-
governable temper, of fierce likes and dislikes, imperious,
a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of,
and a primitive disposition’) was quite capable of making
a child’s life miserable. Munro was not himself beaten,
Augusta preferred his younger brother for that exercise,
but we can measure the hatred he felt for her in his story
of the small boy Conradin who prayed so successfully for
vengeance to his tame ferret. 4 44 Whoever will break it to
the poor child ? I couldn’t for the life of me! ”, exclaimed
a shrill voice, and while they debated the matter among
themselves Conradin made himself another piece of
toast.’ Unhappiness wonderfully aids the memory, and

128

THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD

the best stories of Munro are ail of childhood, its humour
and its anarchy as well as its cruelty and unhappiness.

For Munro reacted to those years rather differently
from Kipling. He, too, developed a style like a machine in
self-protection, but what sparks this machine gave off. He
did not protect himself like Kipling with manliness,
knowingness, imaginary adventures of soldiers and Em-
pire Builders (though a certain nostalgia for such a life
can be read into The Unbearable Bassington ): he pro-
tected himself with epigrams as closely set as currants in
an old-fashioned Dundee cake. As a young man trying to
make a career with his father’s help in the Burma Police,
he wrote to his sister in 1893 complaining that she had
made no effort to see A Woman of No Importance .
Reginald and Clovis are children of Wilde: the epigrams,
the absurdities fly unremittingly back and forth, they
dazzle and delight, but we are aware of a harsher, less
kindly mind behind them than Wilde’s. Clovis and
Reginald are not creatures of fairy tale, they belong
nearer to the visible world than Ernest Maltravers. While
Ernest floats airily like a Rubens cupid among the over-
blue clouds, Clovis and Reginald belong to the Park, the
tea-parties of Kensington, and evenings at Covent Garden
— they even sometimes date, like the suffragettes. They
cannot quite disguise, in spite of the glint and the sparkle,
the loneliness of the Barnstaple years — they are quick to
hurt first, before they can be hurt, and the witty and
devastating asides cut like Aunt Augusta’s cane. How
often these stories are stories of practical jokes. The
victims with their weird names are sufficiently foolish to
awaken no* sympathy — they are the middle-aged, the
people with power; it is right that they should suffer
temporary humiliation because the world is always on

9 — OE.G.G.

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their side in the long run. Munro, like a chivalrous high-
wayman, only robs the rich: behind all these stories is an
exacting sense of justice. In this they are to be distin-
guished from Kipling’s stories in the same genre — The
Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat and others where
the joke is carried too far. With Kipling revenge rather
than justice seems to be the motive (Aunt Rosa had
established herself in the mind of her victim and corrup-
ted it).

Perhaps I have gone a little too far in emphasizing the
cruelty of Munro’s work, for there are times when it seems
to remind us only of the sunniness of the Edwardian
scene, young men in boaters, the box at the Opera, long
lazy afternoons in the Park, tea out of the thinnest porce-
lain with cucumber sandwiches, the easy irresponsible
prattle.

‘Never be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets
the fattest lion.’

‘There’s Marion Mulciber, who mould think she could
ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to
a hospital, now she’s gone into a Sisterhood — lost all she
had you know, and gave the rest to Heaven.’

‘Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with
a strong English accent . 5

‘It requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a
marked manner in the middle of the second Act when
your carriage is not ordered till twelve/

Sad to think that this sunniness and this prattle could
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THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD

not go on for ever, but the worst and cruellest practical
joke was left to the end. Munro’s w T itty cynical hero,
Comus Bassington, died incongruously of fever in a West
African village, and in the early morning of 13 November
1916, from a shallow crater near Beaumont Hamel,
Munro was heard to shout ‘Put out that bloody cigarette. 5
They were the unpredictable last words of Clovis and
Reginald.

MAN MADE ANGRY

It is a waste of time criticizing Leon Bloy as a novelist:
he hadn’t the creative instinct — he was busy all the time
being created himself* created by his own angers and
hatreds and humiliations. Those who meet him first in
this grotesque and ill-made novel* need go no further
than the dedication to Brigand-Kaire* Ocean Captain* to
feel the angry quality of his mind. e God keep you safe
from fire and steel and contemporary literature and the
malevolence of the evil dead. 3 He was a religious man but
without humility* a social reformer without disinterested-
ness* he hated the world as a saint might have done* but
only because of what it did to him and not because of
what it did to others. He never made the mistake by
worldly standards of treating his enemies with tolerance
— and in that he resembled the members of the literary
cliques he most despised. Unlike his contemporary
Peguy* he would never have risked damnation himself in
order to save another soul, and though again and again
we are surprised by sentences in his work of nobility or
penetration* they are contradicted by the savage and
selfish core of his intelligence. ‘I must stop now, my
beloved* 3 he wrote to his fiancee* ‘to go and suffer for
another day 3 ; he had prayed for suffering* and yet he
never ceased to complain that he had been granted more
of it than most men; it made him at the same time
boastful and bitter.

He wrote in another letter:

*1 am forty three years old* and I have published some
literary works of considerable importance. Even my
enemies can see that I am a great artist. Also, I have

* The Woman Who Was Poor .

MAN MADE ANGRY

suffered much for the truth, whereas I could have prosti-
tuted my pen, like so many others, and lived on the fat of
the land. I have had plenty of opportunities, but I have
not chosen to betray justice and I have preferred misery,
obscurity and indescribable agony. It is obvious that
these things ought to merit respect.’

It is obvious too that these things would have been
better claimed for him by others. It is the self-pity of this
attitude, the luxurious bitterness that prevents Bloy from
being more than an interesting eccentric of the Catholic
religion. He reminds us — in our own literature — a little
of Patmore, and sometimes of Corvo. He is near Patmore
in his brand of pious and uxorious sexuality which makes
him describe the character of Clotiide, the heroine of
his novel, as ‘chaste as a Visitationist Sister’s rosary’, and
near Corvo in the furious zest with which he takes sides
against his characters : ‘She bellowed, if the comparison
may be permitted, like a cow that has been forgotten in a
railway truck.’ Indeed the hatred he feels for the char-
acters he has himself created (surely in itself a mark of
limited imagination) leads him to pile on the violence to a
comic extent — ‘a scandalous roar of cachinnation . . .
like a bellowing of cattle from some goitred valley colo-
nized by murderers’.

No, one reads this novel of Bloy not for his characters,
who are painted only deformity-deep, nor for his story,
but for the occasional flashes of his poetic sense, for
images like, ‘upright souls are reserved for rectilinear
torments’; for passages with a nervous nightmare vision
which reminds us of Rilke:

‘A little middledass township, with a pretension to the
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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

possession of gardens, such as are to be found in the
quarters colonized by eccentrics, where murderous land-
lords hold out the bait of horticulture to trap those con-
demned to die. 5

We read him with pleasure to just the extent that we
share the hatred of life which prevented him from being
a novelist or a mystic of the first order (he might have
taken as his motto Gauguin’s great phrase — ‘Life being
what it is, one dreams of revenge 5 ) and because of a cer-
tain indestructible honesty and self-knowledge which in
the long run always enables him to turn his fury on him-
self, as when in one of his letters he recognizes the pres-
ence of ‘that bitch literature’ penetrating ‘even the most
naif stirrings of my heart’.

1939

134

G. K. CHESTERTON

i

It is possible to argue that the best biographies have
been the result of conflict and not of surrender. One
pictures the biographer, however cheerfully he may have
undertaken his task, glowering with sullen determination
and resentment at the huge mass of intractable material
any life must represent. A man lives for seventy years : to
make sense of this is a worse labour than reducing to
order the record of a mere four-years’ war. To simplify
is essential: so we see Boswell brushing aside in a few
pages more than half his subject’s lifetime, or Lytton
Strachey choosing one characteristic sentence and hold-
ing it like a thread of cotton through the maze.

Mrs Ward, however, is too fond of her subject and too
close to it to reduce her material into a portrait for
strangers. Her biography* is often of great interest: it is
a useful and sometimes explicit corrective to Mrs Cecil
Chesterton’s vulgar and inaccurate study of the Chester-
ton family ; but it is too long for its material, too cumbered
with affectionate trivialities. When we love we hoard a
scrap of dialogue, a picture postcard, a foreign coin, but
‘these foolish things ’ must be excluded from a biography
which is written for strangers. Mrs Ward has amiably
supposed her readers to be all friends of her subject: her
book would have been better if she had realized — as
Stevenson’s biographers also failed to realize — that in the
case of a great writer the years inevitably produce
enemies. One wishes, too, that she had remembered
more frequently her non-Catholic audience. Remarks
such as c the “holier bread” came perhaps to his [Ches-
terton’s] mind from the fact that the average of Daily

* Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward.

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame’ display
the embarrassing parochialism which haunts so much
Catholic writing in England.

Chesterton’s bibliography consists of one hundred
volumes, the c quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a
free mind’, as Mrs Ward admirably expresses it. Out of
this enormous output time will choose. Time often
chooses oddly, or so it seems to us, though it is more
reasonable to suppose that it is we ourselves who are
erratic in our judgements. We are already proving our
eccentricity in the case of Chesterton: a generation that
appreciates Joyce finds for some reason Chesterton’s
equally fanatical play on words exhausting. Perhaps it is
that he is still suspected of levity, and the generation now
reaching middle-age has been a peculiarly serious one.
Mrs Ward should at least alter that opinion: she dwells
at great length on Chesterton’s political opinions. He
cared passionately for individual liberty and for local
patriotism, but the party which he largely inspired has an
art-and-crafty air about it to-day. He was too good a man
for politics: he never, one feels, penetrated far enough
into the murky intricacies of political thought. To be a
politician a man needs to be a psychologist, and Chester-
ton was no psychologist, as his novels prove. He saw
things in absolute terms of good and evil, and his im-
mense charity prevented him admitting the amount of
ordinary shabby deception in human life. At their worst
our politicians were fallen angels.

For the same reason that he failed as a political writer
he succeeded as a religious one, for religion is simple,
dogma is simple. Much of the difficulty of theology arises
from the efforts of men who are not primarily writers to
distinguish a quite simple idea with the utmost accuracy.

136

G. K. CHESTERTON

He restated the original thought with the freshness,
simplicity, and excitement of discovery. In fact, it was
discovery: he unearthed the defined from beneath the
definitions, and the reader wondered why the definitions
had ever been thought necessary. Orthodoxy , The
Thing and The Everlasting Man are among the great
books of the age. Much else, of course, it will be disap-
pointing if time does not preserve out of that weight of
work : The Ballad of the White Horse , the satirical poems,
such prose fantasies as The Man Who Was Thursday and
The Napoleon of Netting Hill , the early critical books on
Browning and Dickens ; but in these three religious books,
inspired by a cosmic optimism, the passionately held
belief that £ it is good to be here’, he contributed what
another great religious writer closely akin to him in
political ideas, and even in style, saw was most lacking in
our age. Peguy put these lines on man into the mouth of
his Creator:

On pent ltd demander heaucoup de cceur, beaucoup de
chariti , beaucoup de sacrifice .

II a beaucoup defoi et beaucoup de charite .

Mais ce qiTon ne pent pas lui demander , s acre die, dest
un peu d'esperance.

1944

2

A man’s enemies are not always deserved. He has not
chosen his in-laws. The most obvious feature of Mrs
Cecil Chesterton’s book* is the steady under-current of
rather petty dislike: dislike of her sister-in-law, who took

* The Chesterton s 3 Mrs Cecil Chesterton,

137

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

G. K. Chesterton away from London, from the convivial
Fleet Street nights, to the quiet of Beaconsfield. Mrs
Chesterton paints — from her personal angle — the picture
of an unhappy man cut off from the companionship of
his peers, his mind dulled and his work ruined. But it is
possible to doubt whether in fact those noisy pub-crawl-
ing Fleet Street friends, Crosland and the rest, were his
peers, and whether he ever wrote better books than The
Everlasting Man , The Thing and the Autobiography — all
completed at Beaconsfield. Dislike may produce a good
book, but not when it is expressed so covertly as here —
the sneer between the lines, from the first page, when we
read that Chesterton ‘was a striking figure in those days 5
(the days, Mrs Chesterton means, before his marriage,
but when was he not a striking figure ?) to almost the last,
when she complains that there was not enough to eat and
drink after G. K.’s funeral. On p. 26 we are introduced
to Frances Chesterton: ‘She looked charming in blue or
green, but she rarely wore those shades, and usually
effected dim browns and greys 5 ; on p. 70, c a tragedy fell
on the Blogg family which hit Frances cruelly hard. She
had an engrossing affection for her people; they were
indeed the altar of sacrifice, both for her and her hus-
band 5 ; on p. 72, ‘She did not like food, except cakes,
chocolate and similar flim-flams, and her appreciation of
liquor stopped short at tea 5 ; on p. 69, ‘Frances disliked
the Press as such, and really only cared for small journals
and parish magazines, to which she contributed her quite
charming verse. 5 So they go on, the little gibes against
the dead woman who did not care for Fleet Street, harm-
less and silly enough if it were not for the culminating
passage of staggering vulgarity which purports to de-
scribe — in the melodramatic and sensational terms of the

138

G. K. CHESTERTON

novelettes the author used to write — Chesterton’s wed-
ding night. Chesterton is supposed to have confided this
to his brother, and one can only say that in that case he
trusted someone who was not to be trusted. Mrs Cecil
Chesterton may consider that this passage of her book
disposes of Frances Chesterton once and for all; it dis-
poses far more destructively of the author who is ready
to print it.

It must be admitted that it is not only her enemies who
suffer from Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s tastelessness. Her
own honeymoon is thus described :

‘In honour of the occasion I wore a dress of green and
gold — a favourite combination of Cecil’s. I was all ready
when he emerged from his bedroom, astonishingly well
groomed. He looked at me from the door, and his face
lit up, almost ecstatically, as though he had glimpsed
some sort of vision. . . For mine is the kingdom, the
power and the glory, sweetheart,” he said softly, and I
wondered at the worship in his eyes.’

One is reminded again and again of a song called
‘Literary Widows’ in one of Mr Farjeon’s early revues
which had a refrain something like this :

Shovel the dust on the old man's coffin ,
Then pick up your pen and write .

One is left contrasting these badly-written, expansive,
discretionless memoirs with the silence of Frances
Chesterton, the wife of the greater brother, who will be

139

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

remembered in her husband’s verse long after these spite-
ful anecdotes are forgotten.

With leaves below and leaves above,

And groping under tree and tree >

I found the home of my true love
Who is a wandering home for me .

194 *

140

WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES

Every creative writer worth our consideration, every
writer who can be called in the wide eighteenth-century
use of the term a poet, is a victim : a man given over to an
obsession. Was it not the obsessive fear of treachery
which dictated not only James’s plots but also his elabor-
ate conceits (behind the barbed network of his style he
could feel really secure himself), and was it not another
obsession, a terrible pity for human beings, which drove
Hardy to write novels that are like desperate acts of
rebellion in a lost cause ? What obsession then do we find
in Mr de la Mare — one of the few living writers who can
survive in this company ?

The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the
symbols an author uses, and it would not be far from the
truth — odd as it may seem on the face of it — to say that
the dominant symbol in Mr de la Mare’s short stories is
the railway station or the railway journey: sometimes the
small country railway station, all but deserted except by
a couple of travellers chance met and an aged porter, at
dusk or bathed in the quiet meditative light of a harvest
afternoon : sometimes the waiting room of a great junction
with its dying dusty fire and its garrulous occupant. But
if not the dominant symbol at least this symbol — or
rather group of symbols — occurs almost as frequently as
do the ghosts of his poems — the ghosts that listen to the
mother as she reads to her children, the lamenting ghosts
that rattle the door like wind or moisten the glass like
rain. Prose is a more intractable medium than verse. In
prose we must be gently lured outside the boundaries of
our experience. The symbol must in a favourable sense
of the word be prosaic.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

4 One hasty glance around him showed that he was the
sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the ob-
scure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the
decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the
dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened
already with the blackness of coming night . 5 (The Tree )

"When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the
railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting-room
grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone
in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift
the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof
outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses
beyond. And the grained massive black-leathered furni-
ture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have
been made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence
that one may hope will never occur. One can hardly at
any rate imagine it to have been designed by a really good
man ! 5 (Crewe)

\ . . at this instant the sad neutral winter landscape,
already scarcely perceptible beneath a thin grey skin of
frozen snow and a steadily descending veil of tiny flakes
from the heavens above it, was suddenly blotted out. The
train lights had come on, and the small cabin in which
the two of them sat together had become a cage of
radiance. How Lavinia hated too much light . 5 (A Fro-
ward Child)

"She was standing at the open window [of the train],
looking out, but not as if she had ever entirely desisted
from looking in — an oval face with highish cheekbones,
and eyes and mouth from which a remote smile was now

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WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES

vanishing as softly and secretly as a bird enters and
vanishes into its nest/ (A Nest of Singing Birds )

‘The noonday express with a wildly soaring crescendo
of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of
onset round the curve, soared through the little green
empty station— its windows a long broken faceless glint
of sunlit glass — and that too vanished. Vanished! A swirl
of dust and an unutterable stillness followed after it. The
skin of a banana on the platform was the only proof that
it had come and gone. Its shattering clamour had left for
contrast an almost helpless sense of peace. “Yes, yes!”
we all seemed to be whispering — from the Cedar of
Lebanon to the litde hyssop in the wall — “here we all
are; and still, thank heaven, safe. Safe!” (Ding Dong
Bell)

It is surely impossible not to feel ourselves in the
presence of an obsession — the same obsession that haunts
the melancholy subtle cadences of Mr de la Mare’s
poetry. Such trite phrases as ‘ships that pass’, ‘travellers
through life’, ‘journey’s end’ are the way in which for
centuries the common man has taken a sidelong glance
at the common fate (to be here, and there, and gone) —
and looked away again. But every once in a while, perhaps
only once or twice in a century, a man finds he cannot so
easily dismiss with a regulation phrase what meets his
eyes: the eyes linger: the obsession is bom — in an
Emily Bronte, a Beddoes, a James Thomson, in Mr de la
Mare.

“‘Mors. And what does Mors mean?” enquired that
oddly indolent voice in the quiet. “Was it his name, or

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his initials* or is it a charm ? 53 “It means — well, sleep * 5 3
I said. “Or nightmare, or dawn, or nothing, or — it might
mean everything . 55 I confess, though, that to my ear it
had the sound at that moment of an enormous breaker,
bursting on the shore of some unspeakably remote island
and we two marooned . 5 ( Ding Dong Bell)

One thing, it will be noticed in all these stories. Mors
does not mean; it does not mean Hell — or Heaven. That
obsession with death that fills Mr de la Mare’s poetry
with the whisper of ghosts, that expresses itself over and
over again in the short story in the form of revenants > has
never led him to accept — or even to speculate on — the
Christian answer. Christianity when it figures in these
stories is like a dead religion of which we see only the
enormous stone memorials. Churches do occur — in All
Hallows , The Trumpet , Strangers and Pilgrims , but they
are empty haunted buildings.

‘At this moment of the afternoon the great church
almost cheated one into the belief that it was possessed
of a life of its own. It lay, as I say, couched in its natural
hollow, basking under the dark dome of the heavens like
some half-fossilized monster that might at any moment
stir and awaken out of the swoon to which the wand of
the enchanter had committed it . 5 (All Hallows)

What an odd world, to those of us with traditional
Christian beliefs, is this world of Mr de la Mare’s : the
world where the terrible Seaton’s Aunt absorbs the living
as a spider does and remains alive herself in the company
of the dead. T don’t look to flesh and blood for my com-
pany. When you’ve got to be my age, Mr Smithers (which

144

WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES

God forbid), you’ll find life a very different affair from
what you seem to think it is now. You won’t seek com-
pany then. I’ll be bound. It’s thrust on you’; the world
of the recluse Mr Bloom, that spiritualist who had
pressed on too far ignoring the advice that the poet would
have given him.

Bethink thee: emery enticing league thou wend
Beyond the mark where life its bound hath set
Will lead thee at length where human pathways end
And the dark enemy spreads his maddening net .

How wrong, however, it would be to give the impression
that Mr de la Mare is just another, however accomplished,
writer of ghost stories, yet what is it that divides this
world of Mr Kempe and Mr Bloom and Seaton’s Aunt,
the dubious fellow-passenger with Lavinia in the train,
the stranger in Crewe waiting room from the world of
the late M. R. James’s creation — told by the antiquary ?
M. R. James with admirable skill invented ghosts to
make the flesh creep; astutely he used the image which
would best convey horror; he was concerned with truth
only in the sense that his stories must ring true — while
they were being read. But Mr de la Mare is concerned,
like his own Mr Bloom, to find out : his stories are true in
the sense that the author believes — and conveys his belief
— that this is the real world, but only in so far as he has
yet discovered it. They are tentative. His use of prose
reminds us frequently of a blind man trying to describe
an object from che touch only — ‘this thing is circular, or
nearly circular, oddly dinted, too hard to be a ball: it
might be, yes it might be, a human skull’. At any moment
we expect a complete discovery, but the discovery is

IQ— C.E.G.G.

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delayed. We, as well as the author, are this side of Lethe.
When I was a child I used to be horrified by Carroll’s
poem The Hunting of the Snark. The danger that the
snark might prove to be a boojum haunted me from the
first page, and sometimes reading Mr de la Mare’s stories,
I fear that the author in his strange fumbling at the in-
visible curtain may suddenly come on the inescapable
boojum truth, and just as quickly vanish away.

For how they continually seek their snark, his char-
acters — in railway trains, in deserted churches, even in the
bars of village inns. Listen to them speaking, and see how
all the time they ignore what is at least a fact — that an
answer to their questions has been proposed: how intent
they are to find an alternative, personal explanation : how
they hover and debate and touch and withdraw, while the
boojum waits.

‘There’s Free Will, for example: there’s Moral Re-
sponsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come
from and where we are going to, why, we don’t even
know what we are — in ourselves, I mean. And how many
of us have tried to find out ?’ {Mr Kempe )

‘“The points as I take it, sir, are these. First,” he laid
forefinger on forefinger, “the number of those gone as
compared with ourselves who are still waiting. Next,
there being no warrant that what is seen — if seen at all —
is wraiths of the departed, and not from elsewhere. The
very waterspouts outside are said to be demonstrations of
that belief. Third and last, another question: What pur-
pose could call so small a sprinkling of them back — a few
grains of sand out of the wilderness, unless, it may be,
some festering grievance; or hunger for the living, sir; or

146

WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES

duty left undone ? In which case* mark you, which of any
of us is safe?”’ (Strangers and Pilgrims )

£ “My dream was only — after ; the state after death, as
they call it. . . Mr Eaves leaned forward, and all but
whispered the curious tidings into her ear. “ It’s — it’s just
the same,” he said.’ (The Three Friends )

There is no space in an essay of this length to study the
technique which does occasionally creak with other than
the tread of visitants ; nor to dwell on the minor defects —
the occasional archness, whimsicality, playfulness,
especially when Mr de la Mare is unwise enough to dress
his narrator up in women’s clothes (as he did in The
Memoirs of a Midget ). Perhaps we could surrender with-
out too much regret one third of his short stories, but
what a volume would be left. The Almond Tree> Seaton's
Aunty The Three Friendsy The Count's Courtshipy Miss
Duveeny A Reclusey Willows , Crewey An Ideal Craftsmany
A Froward Childy A Revenanty The Trumpety Strangers
and Pilgrimsy Mr Kempe, Missingy Disillusionedy AU
Hallows — here is one man’s choice of what he could not,
under any circumstances, spare.

In all these stories we have a prose unequalled in its
richness since the death of James, or dare one, at this date,
say Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson comes par-
ticularly to mind because he played with so wide a
vocabulary — the colloquial and the literary phrase, in-
corporating even the dialect word and naturalizing it. So
Mr de la Mare will play consciously with cliches (hemmed
like James’s between inverted commas), turning them
under-side as it were to the reader, and showing what other
meanings lie there hidden: he will suddenly enrich a

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colloquial conversation with a literary phrase out of the
common tongue, or enrich on the contrary a conscious
literary description with a turn of country phrase —
"destiny was spudding at his tap root’.

With these resources at his command no one can bring
the natural visible world more sharply to the eye : from the
railway carriage window we watch the landscape unfold,
the sparkle of frost and rain, the glare of summer sun-
light, the lights in evening windows; we are wooed and
lulled sometimes to the verge of sleep by the beauty of
the prose, until suddenly without warning a sentence
breaks in mid-breath and we look up and see the terrified
eyes of our fellow-passenger, appealing, hungry, scared,
as he watches what we cannot see — "the sediment of an
unspeakable obsession 5 , and a certain glibness would
seem to surround our easy conscious Christian answers
to all that wild speculation, if we could ever trust our-
selves to urge that cold comfort upon this stranger
travelling "our way 5 .

1948

148

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

immense influence on such writers as Mrs Woolf and
Miss Steins and through them on their disciples. Her
novel, therefore; has something in common with Bowles’s
Sonnets. She herself became influenced about halfway
through these four volumes (comprising twelve novels or
instalments) by the later novels of Henry James — the
result; though it increased the obscurity of her sensibility;
was to the good, for she began to shed the adjectives
which in the first volume disguise any muscles her prose
may possess — 'large soft fresh pink full-blown roses’ is
only one phrase in a paragraph containing 41 adjectives
qualifying 15 nouns. Or was it simply that Miriam became
a little older, unhappier, less lyrical ? In the monstrous
subjectivity of this novel the author is absorbed into her
character. There is no longer a Miss Richardson: only
Miriam— Mariam off to teach English in a German school,
off again to be a teacher in North London, a governess in
the country, a dental secretary in Wimpole Street: a
flotsam of female friendships piling up, descriptions of
clothes, lodgings, encounters at the Fabian Society:
Miriam taking to reviewing, among the first bicyclists,
Miriam enlightened about socialism and women’s rights,
reading Zola from Mudie’s (surely this is inaccurate) and
later Ibsen, losing her virginity tardily and ineffectually on
page 218 of volume 4. When the book pauses we have not
yet reached the Great War.

There are passages of admirable description, characters
do sometimes emerge clearly from the stream of con-
sciousness — the Russian Jew, Mr Shatov, waiting at the
end of the street with a rose, patronizing the British
Museum, an embarrassing and pathetic companion, and
the ex-nurse Eleanor Dear, the lower middle-class con-
sumptive clawing her unscrupulous pretty acquisitive way

150

THE SARATOGA TRUNK

through other people's lives. There are passages, too,
where Miriam's thought, in its Jacobean dress, takes on
her master's wide impressionist poetry among the dental
surroundings, as in this description of the frightened peer
who has cancelled all his appointments:

‘Through his staccato incoherencies — as he stood
shamed and suppliant, and sociable down to the very
movement of his eyelashes, and looking so much as if he
had come straight from a racecourse that her mind's eye
saw the diagonal from shoulder to hip of the strap of his
binoculars and upon his head the grey topper that would
complete his dress, and the gay rose in his buttonhole —
she saw his pleasant life, saw its coming weeks, the best
and brightest of the spring season, broken up by appoint-
ments to sit every few days for an indefinite time enduring
discomfort and sometimes acute pain, and facing the
intimate reminder that the body doesn’t last, facing and
feeling the certainty of death.’

But the final effect, I fear, is one of weariness (that may
be a tribute to Miss Richardson’s integrity), the weariness
of the best years of life shared with an earnest, rather
sentimental, and complacent woman. For one of the
drawbacks of Miss Richardson's unironic, undetached
method is that the compliments paid so frequently
to the wit or intellect of Miriam seem addressed to the
author herself. (We are reminded of those American
women who remark to strangers, ‘They simply wor-
shipped me.') And as for the method — it must have
seemed in 1915 a revivifying change from the tyranny of
the ‘plot'. But time has taken its revenge: after twenty
years of subjectivity, we are turning back with relief to

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the old dictatorship, to the detached and objective treat-
ment, while this novel, ignoring all signals, just ploughs
on and on, the Saratoga trunk, labelled this time for
Switzerland, for Austria, shaking on the rack, and
Miriam still sensitively on the alert, reading far too much
significance into a cup of coffee, a flower in a vase, a fog,
or a sunset.

1938

152

ARABIA DESERTA

One opens the new novel by Mr Conrad Aiken* with all
the excitement that comes from complete confidence in
the author. One is satisfied beforehand of the impregnable
front he will offer to the details of criticism, the con-
temporary nature of his thought, the subtlety and exacti-
tude of his style, his technical ability which never allows
a value to escape. One can surrender at once to apprecia-
tion, to the deep interest of his psychological exploration.
One of the characters in Great Circle described the map
of a brain as being like an imaginary map of Mars. "Full
of Arabia Desertas. Canals, seas, mountains, glaciers,
extinct volcanoes, or ulcers . . . And all that strange con-
gregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is
what speaks and acts/ That is the region in which Mr
Aiken moves.

King Coffin is a study in madness. The Arabia Deserta
of Jasper Ammen’s brain lies much further from the
ordinary trade routes than the brain Mr Aiken mapped in
Great Circle of the damned-to-be-cuckolded dweller in
polite Cambridge, Mass., further, I think, than many pre-
vious novelists have gone. Jasper Ammen is an ego-
centric; one sees him always from inside his brain, trying
to get free in a crazy superman pride from life, from the
little circle of theoretical anarchists he has supported with
his money, from the woman who loves him, from every
friend in turn, by deliberate acts of rudeness, by mystifi-
cations, asserting his superiority by small social immorali-
ties such as reading other people’s letters and diaries. The
last stage of that assertion, of course, must be to destroy
life. But the crime must be a pure one; if he murders a
friend, too many impure motives, of irritation, boredom,

* King Coffin .

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Jealousy, may play their part, so Ammen chooses a com-
plete stranger, a little man he happens to notice in the
subway.

To satisfy his sense of power Ammen sets himself to
learn all the details of the life he proposes to end; he
speaks to Jones on the telephone, sends him theatre
tickets anonymously the better to watch him, shadows
him to his office and his home in its mean villa-ed street,
he even makes his way into the cellar of his house when
all above are occupied with childbirth. All interests but
Jones, the chosen stranger, and his own sense of power
fade out of Ammen 1 S s brain: ordinary life reaches him
only in snatches of overheard conversation, married
people talking on stairways, girls in the street, two
students starting a car.

Ammen’s madness is not of merely specialized interest,
for it is a form of self-consciousness, not of derangement.
He has carried consciousness of himself, the mapping of
his own brain, to a point that excludes the world, but it is
an accurate, not a crazily drawn map. The pathos of his
situation is that so complete a self-consciousness must
inevitably recognize its own defeat. The moment of
cutting himself loose, the moment when he made his
decision to destroy, is the only real moment of detach-
ment, of complete superiority:

Tt seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote
and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and
although it was still spring, somehow now it seemed as if
he was looking back to it from another season, another
year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and
this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new
things, new undertakings — the stranger had not yet been

154

ARABIA DESERTA

discovered or his strangeness identified, the whole prob-
lem still remained metaphysical — a mere formula — and
it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there
had been an unmistakable sense of freedom which had, at
once, with the actual selection of Jones disappeared . 5

The values of this story could not have been conveyed
through any other mind than Ammen’s, but Mr Aiken,
of course, by keeping his story inside the egocentric
consciousness, has had to sacrifice all the usual entice-
ments of the novel in the way of vivid objective characteri-
zation. I wish I could convey with what poetry and subtle
drama, with what pathos in the climax when hopeless
defeated Ammen watches Jones put away his still-born
child in the hideous marble necropolis, Mr Aiken has
compensated the reader. Mr Herbert Read once wrote of
the psychological complexity of James’s world that 4 it was
obviously the real world, the only world worth describing,
once your course is set that way. Henry James went
ahead, fearlessly, irretrievably, into regions where few
are found who care to follow him.’ Mr Aiken is one of the
few — which is only another way of saying that he is per-
haps the most exciting, the most finally satisfying of
living novelists.

1935

155

THE POKER-FACE

One has seen that face over a hundred bar counters —
the lick of hair over the broad white brow, the heavy
moustache with pointed ends, the firm, good-humoured
eyes, the man who is a cause of conviviality in other men
but knows exactly when the fun should cease. He is wear-
ing a dark suit (the jacket has four buttons) and well-
polished boots. Could Sherlock Holmes have deduced
from this magnificently open appearance anything at all
resembling the bizarre truth ?

Mr Hesketh Pearson tells this far from ordinary story*
with his admirable accustomed forthrightness: Mr
Pearson as a biographer has some of the qualities of Dr
Johnson — a plainness, an honesty, a sense of ordinary
life going on all the time. A dull biographer would never
have got behind that poker-face; an excited biographer
would have made us disbelieve the story, which wanders
from whaling in the Arctic to fever on the West Coast of
Africa, a practice in Portsea to ghost-hunting in Sussex.
But from Mr Pearson we are able to accept it. Conan
Doyle has too often been compared with Dr Watson: in
this biography it is Mr Pearson who plays Watson to the
odd enigmatic product of a Jesuit education, the Sher-
lock-hearted Doyle.

It is an exciting story admirably told, and it is one of
Mr Pearson’s virtues that he drives us to champion the
subject against his biographer (Johnson has the same
effect on the reader). For example, this reviewer would
like to put in a word which Mr Pearson omits for the
poetic quality in Doyle, the quality which gives life to
his work far more surely than does his wit. Think of the
sense of horror which hangs over the laurelled drive of

* Conan Doyle: His Life and Art , by Hesketh Pearson.

156

THE POKER-FACE

Upper Norwood and behind the curtains of Lower
Camberwell: the dead body of Bartholomew Sholto
swinging to and fro in Pondicherri Lodge, the ‘bristle of
red hair 5 , ‘the ghastly inscrutable smile 5 , and in contrast
Watson and Miss Mortsan hand in hand like children
among the strange rubbish heaps : he made Plumstead
Marshes and the Barking Level as vivid and unfamiliar
as a lesser writer would have made the mangrove swamps
of the West Coast which he had also known and of which
he did not bother to write.

And, unlike most great writers, he remained so honest
and pleasant a man. The child who wrote with careful
necessary economy to his mother from Stonyhurst: T
have been to the Taylor, and I showed him your letter,
explaining to him that you wanted something that would
wear well and at the same time look well. He told me
that the blue cloth he had was meant especially for Coats,
but that none of it would suit well as Fresson. He showed
me a dark sort of cloth which he said would suit a coat
better than any other cloth he has and would wear well as
trousers. On his recommendation I took this cloth. I
think you will like it ; it does not show dirt and looks very
well; it is a sort of black and white very dark cloth 5 ; this
child had obviously the same character as the middle-
aged man who wrote chivalrously and violently against
Shaw in defence of the Titanic officers (he was probably
wrong, but, as Mr Pearson nearly says, most of us would
have preferred to be wrong with Doyle than right with
Shaw).

It isn’t easy for an author to remain a pleasant human
being: both success and failure are usually of a crippling
kind. There are so many opportunities for histrionics,
hysterics, waywardness, self-importance; within very

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

wide limits a writer can do what he likes and go where
he likes, and a human being has seldom stood up so well
to such a test of freedom as Doyle did. The eccentric
figure of his partner, Dr Budd, may stride like a giant
through the early pages of his biography, but in memory
he dwindles into the far distance, and in the foreground
we see the large, sturdy, working shoulders, a face so
commonplace that it has the effect of a time-worn
sculpture representing some abstract quality like Kind-
ness or Patience, but never, one would mistakenly have
said, Imagination or Poetry.

1943

158

FORD MADOX FORD

i

The death of Ford Madox Ford was like the obscure
death of a veteran — an impossibly Napoleonic veteran,
say, whose immense memory spanned the period from
Jena to Sedan: he belonged to the heroic age of English
fiction and outlived it — yet he was only sixty-six. In one
of his many volumes of reminiscence — those magnificent
books where in an atmosphere of casual talk outrageous
story jostles outrageous story— he quoted Mr Wells as
saying some years ago that in the southern counties a
number of foreigners were conspiring against the form
of the English novel. There was James at Lamb House,
Crane at Brede Manor, Conrad at The Pent, and he might
have added his own name, Hueffer at Aldington, for he
was a quarter German (and just before the first world war
made an odd extravagant effort to naturalize himself as a
citizen of his grandfather’s country). The conspiracy, of
course, failed: the big loose middlebrow novel goes on
its happy way unconscious of James’s ‘point of view’:
Conrad is regarded again as the writer of romantic sea
stories and purple passages: nobody reads Crane, and
Ford — well, an anonymous writer in The Times Literary
Supplement remarked in an obituary notice that his novels
began to date twenty years ago. Conservatism among
English critics is extraordinarily tenacious, and they
hasten, on a man’s death, to wipe out any disturbance
he has caused.

The son of Francis Hueffer, the musical critic of The
Times, and grandson, on his mother’s side, of Ford
Madox Brown, ‘Fordie’ Hueffer emerges into history at
the age of three offering a chair to Turgenev, and again,
a little later, dressed in a suit of yellow velveteen with

159

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

gold buttons, wearing one red stocking and one green one,
and with long golden hair, having his chair stolen from
him at a concert by the Abbe Liszt. I say emerges into
history, but it is never possible to say where history ends
and the hilarious imagination begins. He was always an
atmospheric writer, whether he was describing the con-
fused Armistice night when Tietjens found himself back
with his mistress, Valentine Wannop, among a horde of
grotesque and inexplicable strangers, or just recounting a
literary anecdote of dubious origin — the drunk writer
who thought himself a Bengal tiger trying to tear out the
throat of the blind poet Marston, or Henry James getting
hopelessly entangled in the long lead of his dachshund
Maximilian. Nobody ever wrote more about himself than
Ford, but the figure he presented was just as dubious as
his anecdotes — the figure of a Tory country gentleman
who liked to grow his own food and had sturdy independ-
ent views on politics: it all seems a long way from the
yellow velveteen. He even, at the end of his life, a little
plump and a litde pink, looked the part — and all the
while he had been turning out the immense number of
books which stand to his name: memoirs, criticism,
poetry, sociology, novels. And in between, if one can so
put it, he found time to be the best literary editor England
has ever had: what Masefield, Hudson, Conrad, even
Hardy owed to the English Review is well known, and
after the war in The Transatlantic Review he bridged the
great gap, publishing the early Hemingway, Cocteau,
Stein, Pound, the music of Antheil, and the drawings of
Braque.

He had the advantage — or the disadvantage — of being
brought up in pre-Raphaelite circles, and although he
made a tentative effort to break away into the Indian Civil

160

FORD MADOX FORD

Service, he was pushed steadily by his father towards art
— any kind of art was better than any kind of profession.
He published his first book at the age of sixteen, and his
first novel, The Shifting of the Fire , in 1892, when he was
only nineteen — three years before Conrad had published
anything and only two years after the serial appearance
of The Tragic Muse , long before James had matured his
method and his style. It wasn’t, of course, a good book,
but neither was it an ‘arty’ book — there was nothing of
the ’nineties about it except its elegant period binding,
and it already bore the unmistakable Hueffer stamp —
the outrageous fancy, the pessimistic high spirits, and an
abominable hero called Kasker-Ryves. Human nature in
his books was usually phosphorescent — varying from the
daemonic malice of Sylvia Tietjens to the painstaking,
rather hopeless will-to-be-good of Captain Ashbumham,
‘the good soldier’. The little virtue that existed only
attracted evil. But to Mr Ford, a Catholic in theory
though not for long in practice, this was neither surpris-
ing nor depressing: it was just what one expected.

The long roll of novels ended with Vive le Roy in 1937.
A few deserve to be forgotten, but I doubt whether the
accusation of dating can be brought against even such
minor work as Mr Apollo , The Marsden Case, When the
Wicked Man: there were the historical novels, too, with
their enormous vigour and authenticity — The Fifth
Queen and its sequels : but the novels which stand as high
as any fiction written since the death of James are The
Good Soldier with its magnificent claim in the first line,
‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ — the study
of an averagely good man of a conventional class driven,
divided and destroyed by unconventional passion — and
the Tietjens series, that appalling examination of how

161

II — C.E.G.G.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

private malice goes on during public disaster — no escape
even in the trenches from the secret gossip and the law-
yers 5 papers. It is dangerous in this country to talk about
technique or a long essay could be written on his method
in these later books, the method Conrad followed more
stiffly and less skilfully, having learnt it perhaps from
Ford when they collaborated on Romance : James’s point of
view was carried a step further, so that a book took place
not only from the point of view but in the brain of a char-
acter and events were remembered not in chronological
order, but as free association brought them to mind.

When Ford died he had passed through a period of
neglect and was re-emerging. His latest books were not
his best, but they were hailed as if they were. The first
war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was
over military age and was fighting a country he loved;
his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary
world which had carefully eliminated him. For some of
his later work he could not even find a publisher in
England. No wonder he preferred to live abroad — in
Provence or New York. But I don’t suppose failure
disturbed him much: he had never really believed in
human happiness, his middle life had been made miser-
able by passion, and he had come through — with his
humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind
of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a
posterity which would care for good writing.

2

How seldom a novelist chooses the material nearest to his
hand; it is almost as if he were driven to earn experience
the hard way. Ford, whom we might have expected to be-
come a novelist of artistic bohemia, a kind of English

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FORD MADOX FORD

Murger, did indeed employ the material of Fitzroy
Square incomparably well in his volumes of reminiscence
— and some people might regard those as his finest
novels, for he brought to his dramatizations of people he
had known the same astonishing knack he showed with
his historical figures. Most writers dealing with real people
find their invention confined, but that was not so with
Ford. ‘When it has seemed expedient to me I have
altered episodes that I have witnessed, but I have been
careful never to distort the character of the episode. The
accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions . If
you want factual accuracies you must go to . . . but no,
no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me.’ (The italics are
mine : it is a phrase worth bearing in mind in reading all
his works.)

In fact as a novelist Ford began to move further and
further from bohemia for his material. His first period as
an historical novelist, which he began by collaborating
with Conrad in that underrated novel Romance , virtually
closed with his Tudor trilogy. There were to be two or
three more historical novels, until in Ladies Whose Bright
Eyes ... he came half out into the contemporary world
and began to find his true subject. It could even be
argued that in The Fifth Queen he was nearest as a
novelist to Fitzroy Square. There is the sense of satura-
tion ; something is always happening on the stairs, in the
passages the servants come and go on half explained
errands, and the great King may at any moment erupt
upon the scene, half kindly, half malevolent, rather as we
feel the presence of Madox Brown in the gas-lit inter-
stices of No. 37.

Most historical novelists use real characters only for
purposes of local colour — Lord Nelson passes up a

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Portsmouth street or Doctor Johnson enters ponderously
to close a chapter* but in The Fifth Queen we have
virtually no fictional characters — the King, Thomas
Cromwell* Katherine Howard, they are the principals;
we are nearer to the historical plays of Shakespeare than
to the fictions of such historical writers as Miss Irwin or
Miss Heyer.

‘The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my
impressions , 5 In The Fifth Queen Ford tries out the
impressionist method whch he was later to employ with
triumphant ease in the great confused armistice-day
scene of A Man Could Stand Up . The whole story of the
struggle between Katharine and Cromwell for the King
seems told in shadows — shadows which flicker with the
flames of a log-fire* diminished suddenly as a torch
recedes* stand calm awhile in the candlelight of a chapel :
a cresset flares and all the shadows leap together. Has a
novel ever before been lit as carefully as a stage produc-
tion ? Nicolas Udal’s lies, which play so important a part
in the first volume* take their substance from the lighting :
they are monstrously elongated or suddenly shrivel: one
can believe anything by torchlight. (The power of a lie —
that too was a subject he was to pursue through all his
later books: the lies of Sylvia Tietjens which ruined her
husband's army-career and the monstrous lie of ‘poor
Florence’ in The Good Soldier which brought death to
three people and madness to a fourth.)

If The Fifth Queen is a magnificent bravura piece —
and you could say that it was a better painting than ever
came out of Fitzroy Square with all the mingled talents
there of Madox Brown and Morris, Rossetti and Burne-
Jones — in The Good Soldier Ford triumphantly found his
true subject and oddly enough, for a child of the Pre-

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FORD MADOX FORD

Raphaelites, his subject was the English 4 gentleman % the
‘ black and merciless things ’ which lie behind that facade.

‘Edward Ashbumham was the cleanest looking sort of
chap ; — an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of
the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England.
To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have
witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he
never told a story that couldn’t have gone into the columns
of the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years
of my knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them;
he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or
something of that sort. You would have said he was just
exacdy the sort of chap that you could have trusted your
wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness.’

The Good Soldier , which Ford had wished to call The
Saddest Story> concerns the ravages wrought by a pas-
sionate man who had all the virtues but continence. The
narrator is the betrayed husband, and it is through his
eyes alone that we watch the complications and involve-
ments left by Ashbumham’s blind urge towards satis-
faction. Technically the story is undoubtedly Ford’s
masterpiece. The time-shifts are valuable not merely
for purposes of suspense — they lend veracity to the
appalling events. This is just how memory works, and
we become involved with the narrator’s memory as
though it were our own. Ford’s apprenticeship with
Conrad had borne its fruit, but he improved on the
Master.

‘ I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling
way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help
it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage
with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the
wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as
it comes. And when one discusses an affair — a long sad
affair — one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers
points that one has forgotten and one explains them all
the more minutely since one recognizes that one has for-
gotten to mention them in their proper places and that
one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression.
I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and
that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way
a person telling a story would tell them. They will then
seem most real.’

A short enough book it is to contain two suicides, two
ruined lives, a death, and a girl driven insane: it may
seem odd to find the keynote of the book is restraint, a
restraint which is given it by the gentle character of the
narrator (‘lam only an ageing American with very little
knowledge of life 5 ) who never loses his love and compas-
sion for the characters concerned. ‘Here were two noble
people — for I am convinced that both Edward and
Leonora had noble natures — here, then, were two noble
natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a
lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the
mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriora-
ted. And why ? For what purpose ? To point what lesson ?
It is all a darkness. 5 He condemns no one; in extremity
he doesn’t even condemn human nature, and I find one
of the most moving under-statements in literature his
summing up of Leonora’s attitude to her husband’s
temporary infatuation for the immature young woman,

1 66

FORD MADOX FORD

Maisie Maidan : 4 1 think she would really have welcomed
it if he could have come across the love of his life. It would
have given her a rest.’

I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I
have come back to this novel of Ford’s, every time to
discover a new aspect to admire, but I think the impres-
sion which will be left strongly on the reader is the sense
of Ford’s involvement. A novelist is not a vegetable
absorbing nourishment mechanically from soil and air;
material is not easily or painlessly gained, and one can-
not help wondering what agonies of frustration and error
lay behind The Saddest Story.

3

It seems likely that, when time has ceased its dreary work
of erosion, Ford Madox Ford will be remembered as the
author of three great novels, a little scarred, stained here
and there and chipped perhaps, but how massive and
resistant compared with most of the work of his succes-
sors: The Fifth Queen , The Good Soldier , and Parade's
End , the title Ford himself gave to what is often known,
after the name of the principal character, as the Tietjens
tetralogy — the terrifying story of a good man tortured,
pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the
world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and
lying wife.

Ford always wanted to see his novel printed as one
book, but he wanted to see it as a trilogy, consisting only
of Some Do Not . „ . , No More Parades and A Man
Gould Stand Up — the final book. Last Post , was an after-
thought which he had not intended to write and which
later he regretted having written. In a letter dealing with
the possibility of an omnibus edition, which is quoted by

167

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Mr John A. Meixner in his critical study. Ford Madox
Ford’s Novels , Ford wrote : 4 1 strongly wish to omit Last
Post from the edition. I do not like the book and have
never liked it and always intended to end up with A Man
Could Stand Up?

I think it could be argued that Last Post was more than
a mistake — it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed
a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End . The senti-
mentality which sometimes lurks in the shadow of
Christopher Tietjens, the last Tory (Ford sometimes
seems to be writing about "the last English gentleman’)?
emerged there unashamed. Everything was cleared up —
all the valuable ambiguities concerning the parenthood
of Christopher’s son (the suggestion chosen by his wife
Sylvia to torture him), his father’s possible suicide, his
father’s possible relationship to Valentine, Christopher’s
mistress — all, all are brought into the idyllic sunshine of
Christopher’s successful escape into the life of a Kentish
smallholder. Even Sylvia — surely the most possessed
evil character in the modem novel — groped in Last Post
towards goodness, granted Christopher his divorce, took
back— however grudgingly — her lies. It is as though
Lady Macbeth dropped her dagger beside the sleeping
Duncan.

This is a better book, a thousand times, when it ends
in the confusion of Armistice Night 1918 — the two lovers
united, it is true, but with no absolute certainties about
the past so deformed by Sylvia’s lies (if they are lies) or
about the future with that witch-wife still awaiting them
there. Those of us who, even though we were children,
remember Armistice Day (so different from that sober,
reflective V.E. day of 1945) remember it as a day out of
time— an explosion without a future. It was the Armis-

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FORD MADOX FORD

tice only which counted, it was the Armistice too for the
poor tortured lovers: perhaps there would never be a
peace. . . .

4 They were prancing. The whole world round them
was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of
unending roaring circles. The man with the eye-glass had
stuck a half-crown in his other eye. He was well-meaning.
A brother. She had a brother with the V.C. All in the
family.

‘Tietjens was stretching out his two hands from the
waist. It was incomprehensible. His right hand was be-
hind her back, his left in her right hand. She was fright-
ened. She was amazed. Did you ever! He was swaying
slowly. The elephant! They were dancing! Aranjuez was
hanging on to the tall woman like a kid on a telegraph
pole. The officer who had said he had picked up a little
bit of fluff. . . . well, he had ! He had run out and fetched
it. It wore white cotton gloves and a flowered hat. It said :
“Ow! Now!” . . . There was a fellow with a most
beautiful voice. He led: better than a gramophone.
Better . . .

Les petites marionettes , font ! font ! font . . .

‘On an elephant. A dear, meal-sack elephant. She was
setting out on . . .*

This is the end of A Man Could Stand Up> and this
— not the carefully arranged happy finale of Last Post —
was the true conclusion of a story of unhappy marriage, of
Sylvia’s tortuous intrigues which had begun, before the
so-called Great War had dosed in, in a little resort among
the pine woods of Lobscheid. ‘They were sitting playing
bridge in the large, shadowy dining-hall of the hotel:

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Mrs Satterthwaite, Father Con sett, Mr Bayliss. A young
blond sub-lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was
there for a last chance for his right lung and his career,
and the bearded Kur-doctor cut in.’ Sylvia had not yet
entered ‘like a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico %
but I have always been reminded of another wicked
setting, in a poem "written at about the same time:

In depraved May , dogwood and chestnut ,
flowering judas ,

To be eaten , to be divided , to be drunk
Among whispers ; by Mr Silvero
With caressing hands y at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa , bowing among the Titians;

By Madame de Tomquist , in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall y one hand on the door .

Parade's End is not a war-book in the ordinary
sense of the term; true, it was produced from the ex-
periences of 1914-18, but while a novel like All Quiet on
the Western Front confined its horror to the physical, to
the terrors of the trenches, so that it is even possible to
think of such physical terrors as an escape for some from
the burden of thought and mental pain, Ford turned the
screw. Here there was no escape from the private life.
Sylvia pursued her husband even to the headquarters of
his regiment. Unlikely ? Read in The Memoirs of Lord
Chandos how, just out of the heavily shelled Ginchy
valley, he and his friend were greeted by the disquieting
telegrams from home, I remember a week-end reunion

FORD MADOX FORD

with wives and mistresses in the dug-outs of Dien-Bien-
Phu, as the troops waited day by day for the assault. The
private life cannot be escaped and death does not come
when it is most required.

1939 and 1962

FREDERICK ROLFE:

EDWARDIAN INFERNO

The obscurity and what we curiously believe to be the
crudity and violence of the distant past make a suitable
background to the Soul. Temptation* one feels* is seldom
today so heroically resisted or so devastatingly succumbed
to as in the days of Dante or of Milton ; Satan* as well as
sanctity, demands an apron stage. It is* therefore* with a
shock of startled incredulity that we become aware on
occasion even today of eternal issues, of the struggle be-
tween good and evil, between vice that really demands to
be called satanic and virtue of a kind which can only be
called heavenly.

How much less are we prepared for it in the Edwardian
age* in the age of bicycles and German bands and gold
chamber ware, of Norfolk jackets and deerstalker caps.
How distressingly bizarre seems the whole angelic con-
flict which centred around Frederick Rolfe* self-styled
Baron Corvo, the spoilt priest, who was expelled from
the Scots College at Rome, the waster who lived on a
multitude of generous friends* the writer of genius*
author of Hadrian the Seventh and Don Tarquinio and
Chronicles of the House of Borgia. When Rolfe’s fictional
self prayed in his Hampstead lodging:

"God* if ever You loved me* hear me, hear me. De
Profundis ad Te> ad Te clamavi. Don’t I want to be good
and clean and happy? What desire have I cherished
since my boyhood save to serve in the number of Your
mystics ? What but that have I asked of You Who made
me ? Not a chance do You give me — ever — ever — *

it is disquieting to remember how in the outside world
Mr Wells was writing Love on Wheels * the Empire build-

172

FREDERICK ROLFE I EDWARDIAN INFERNO

ers after tiffin at the club were reading "The Song of the
Banjo’, and up the crowded stairway of Grosvenor House
Henry James was bearing his massive brow; disquieting
too to believe that Miss Marie Corelli was only palely
limping after truth when she brought the devil to London.
For if ever there was a case of demonic possession it was
Rolfe’s: the hopeless piety, the screams of malevolence,
the sense of despair which to a man of his faith was the
sin against the Holy Ghost. "All men are too vile for
words to tell.’

The greatest saints have been men with more than a
normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have
sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity. Frederick Rolfe in his
novel Hadrian the Seventh expressed a sincere, if sinister,
devotion to the Church that had very wisely rejected him ;
all the good of which he was capable went into that book,
as all the evil went into the strange series of letters which
Mr Symons has described for the first time,* written at
the end of his life, when he was starving in Venice, to a
rich acquaintance.

‘ He had become a habitual corrupter of youth, a sedu-
cer of innocence, and he asked his wealthy accomplice for
money, first that he might use it as a temptation, to buy
bait for the boys whom he misled, and secondly, so that
he might efficiently act as pander when his friend re-
visited Venice. Neither scruple nor remorse was expres-
sed or implied in these long accounts of his sexual
exploits or enjoyments, which were so definite in their
descriptions that he was forced, in sending them by post,
so to fold them that only blank paper showed through the
thin foreign envelopes.’

* TheQuest for Coroo , by A. J. A. Symons,

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the
starving pander on the Lido and the man of whom Mr
Vincent O’Sullivan wrote to his biographer: 4 He was
bom for the Church : that was his main interest . 5 Between
these bounds, between the Paradise and the Inferno, lay
the weary purgatorial years through which Mr Symons
has been the first to track him with any closeness. Mr
Symons’s method, unchronological, following the story
as he discovered it from witness to witness, lends Rolfe’s
vacillating footprints a painful drama. Continually, with
the stamp of an obstinate courage, they turn back to-
wards Paradise: from the rim of the Inferno they turn
and go back: but on the threshold of Paradise they turn
again because of the devilish pride which would not
accept even Heaven, except on his own terms; this way
and that, like the steps of a man pacing a room in agony
of mind. It is odd to realize that all the time common-or-
garden life is going on within hailing distance, publishers
are making harsh bargains, readers are reporting adverse-
ly on his work, friends are forming hopeless plans of
literary collaboration. Mr Grant Richards and Mon-
signor Benson and Mr Pirie-Gordon and the partners of
Chatto and Windus beckon and speak like figures on the
other side of a distorting glass pane. They have quite a
different reality, much thinner reality, they are not con-
cerned with eternal damnation. And their memories of
Rolfe are puzzled, a little amused, a little exasperated, as
if they cannot understand the eccentricity of a man who
chooses to go about sheathed in flame in the heyday of the
Entente Cordiale, of Sir Ernest Cassel, and Lily Langtry,

Mr O’Sullivan wrote of Rolfe to Mr Symons as a man
‘who had only the vaguest sense of realities 5 , but the
phrase seems a little inaccurate. His realities were less

174

FREDERICK ROLFE: EDWARDIAN INFERNO

material than spiritual. It would be easy to emphasize his
shady financial transactions, his pose as the Kaiser’s god-
son, his complete inability to earn a living. It is terrible
to think what a figure of cruel fun a less imaginative
writer than Mr Symons might have made of Rolfe, turned
out of an Aberdeen boarding house in his pyjamas, paint-
ing pictures with the help of magic-lantern slides, forced
to find employment as a gondolier, begging from stran-
gers, addressing to the Pope a long indictment of living
Catholics. But against this material reality Mr Symons
with admirable justice sets another : the reality of Hadrian
the Seventh , a novel of genius, which stands in relation to
the other novels of its day, much as The Hound of Heaven
stands in relation to the verse. Rolfe’s vice was spiritual
more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a
pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but
his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it
had to be and he was not ashamed to live on his friends ;
if he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the
last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the
Inferno.

1934

175

FREDERICK ROLFE:
FROM THE DEVIL’S SIDE

"He was his own worst enemy’: the little trite memorial
phrase which, in the case of so many English exiles, dis-
poses discreetly and with a tasteful agnosticism of the
long purgatories in foreign pensions , the counted coppers,
the keeping up of appearances, sounds more than usually
unconvincing when applied to Frederick Rolfe. It is the
measure of the man’s vividness that his life always seems
to move on a religious plane: his violent hatreds, his
extreme ingratitude, even his appearance as he described
it himself, ‘offensive, disdainful, slightly sardonic, utterly
unapproachable’, have about them the air of demonic
possession. The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole , the long
autobiographical novel of the last dreadful years in
Venice, the manuscript of which was rediscovered by Mr
A. J. A. Symons, has the quality of a medieval mystery
play, but with this difference, that the play is written
from the devil’s side. The many excellent men and
women, who did their best, sometimes an unimaginative
best, to help Rolfe, here caper like demons beside the
long Venetian water-fronts: the Rev. Bobugo Bonsen
(known on the angels’ side as Monsignor Benson), Harry
Peary-Buthlaw, Professor Macpawkins, Lady Pash. It is
instructive and entertaining to see the great and the good
for once from the devil’s point of view.

And the devil has been fair. Anyone who has read Mr
Symons’s biography of Corvo will recognize how very
fair. The facts (the correspondence with Bonsen and
Peary-Buthlaw, for example) appear to be quite truth-
fully stated; it is Rolfe’s interpretation which is odd.
Offer the starving man a dinner or the homeless man a
bed and instantaneously the good deed is unrecognizably

176

FREDERICK ROLFE : FROM THE DEVIL'S SIDE

distorted. The strangest motives begin obscurely to be
discerned. Is it that one is seeing good from the devil’s
side; c The lovely, clever, good, ugly, silly wicked faces of
this world, all anxious, all selfish, all mean, all unsatisfied
and unsatisfying’: or is it possibly only a horribly deep
insight into human nature ?

The difficulty always is to distinguish between pos-
session by a devil and possession by a holy spirit. Saints
have starved like Rolfe, and no saint had a more firm
belief in his spiritual vocation. He loathed the flesh
(making an unnecessary oath to remain twenty years un-
married that he might demonstrate to unbelieving
ecclesiastics his vocation for the priesthood) and he
loved the spirit. One says that he writes from the devil’s
side, because his shrill rage has the same lack of dignity
as Marlowe’s cracker-throwing demons, because he had
no humility ( e he came as one to whom Mystery has a
meaning and a method, as one of the intimate, and fortu-
nate, as one who belonged, as a son of the Father’), and
because, of course, he had a Monsignor among his
enemies. But the devil, too, is spiritual, and when Rolfe
wrote of the spirit (without the silly rage against his
enemies or the sillier decorated style in which he tried to
make the best of a world he had not been allowed to
renounce) he wrote like an angel; our appreciation is
hardly concerned in the question whether or not it was a
fallen angel:

‘He slowly paced along cypress-avenues, between the
graves of little children with blue or white standards and
the graves of adults marked by more sombre memorials.
All around him were patricians bringing sheaves of
painted candles and gorgeous garlands of orchids and

177

12 — OB.G.G.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

everlastings, or plebians on their knees grubbing up
weeds and tracing pathetic designs with cheap chrysanth-
emums and farthing night-lights. Here, were a baker’s
boy and a telegraph-messenger, repainting their father’s
grave-post with a tin of black and a bottle of gold. There,
were half a dozen ribald venal dishonest licentious young
gondoliers; quiet and alone on their wicked knees round
the grave of a comrade.’

Tt was Saturday. The little triptych on the altar lay
open — Sedes Sapientiae ora pro nobis . — How altogether
lovely these byzantine eikons are! That is because they
have Christian tradition — they alone, in religious art.
Undoubtedly that council of the Church was inspired
divinely which uttered the canon prohibiting painters
from producing any ideals save those ecclesiastically
dictated. Whoever dreams of praying (with expectation
of response) for the prayer of a Tintoretto or a Titian, or
a Bellini, or a Botticelli ? But who can refrain from cry-
ing “O Mother!” to these unruffieable wan dolls in
indigo on gold?’

literature is deep in Mr Symons’s debt, and in debt,
too, to all the libelled philanthropists without whose
permission this book could hardly have been published.

1934

178

FREDERICK ROLFE:
A SPOILED PRIEST

Hubert’s Arthur, the latest work of Frederick Rolfe
to be brought into print by Mr Symons, is a laborious
experiment in imaginary history. The assumption is that
Arthur was not murdered by King John but escaped and,
after recovering a treasure left him by Richard Lion-
Heart, won the crown of Jerusalem and finally, with the
help of Hubert de Burgh, the chronicler of his deeds,
gained the throne of England. Originally Rolfe collabora-
ted with Mr Pirie-Gordon, but after the inevitable quar-
rel he rewrote the story during the last months of his life.
The style, we are told, 'was meant to be an enriched
variant upon that of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi and of
William of Tyre, with an admixture of Maurice Hewlett’.
Hewlett, alas, in this appallingly long and elaborate
fantasy is too much in evidence, and perhaps only a know-
ledge of the circumstances in which it was written, to be
gained from Mr Symons’s biography, gives it interest.

For if Rolfe is to be believed (a very big assumption)
he brought this book to its leisurely decorative dose at
the very time when he claimed to be starving in his gon-
dola on the Venetian lagoons.

‘The moment I cease moving, I am invaded by
swarms of swimming rats, who in the winter are so vora-
dous that they attack even man who is motionless. I have
tried it. And have been bitten. Oh my dear man you can’t
think how artful fearless ferodous they are. I rigged up
two bits of chain, lying loose on my prow and poop with a
string by which I could shake them when attacked. For
two nights the dodge acted. The swarms came (up the
anchor rope) and nuzzled me: I shook the chains: the

179

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

beasts plopped overboard. Then they got used to the
noise and sneered. Then they bit the strings. Then they
bit my toes and woke me shrieking and shaking with fear. 5

The very same day that he was writing this letter
(whether truth or fiction doesn’t really matter: one can-
not doubt the imaginative vividness of the experience) he
was penning, as if he had the whole of a well-fed life
before him, some such slow decorative sentimental de-
scription as this of the dead St Hugh singing before
King Arthur:

"The pretty eyes were closed, the eyes of the innocent
perfectly-satisfied happy face of the little red-gleaming
head which reposed on the pillow of scarlet samite: but
the smiling mouth was a litde open, the rosy lips rhyth-
mically moving, letting glimpses of little white teeth be
seen. . .

That to me is the real dramatic interest of Hubert's
Arthur .

For on the whole it is a dull book of small literary merit,
though it will be of interest to those already interested in
the man, who can catch the moments when he drops the
Hewlett mask and reveals more indirectly than in The
Desire and Pursuit of the Whole his painfully divided
personality. Reading his description of St Hugh, ‘the
sweet and inerrable canorous voice of the dead’, one has
to believe in the genuineness of his nostalgia — for the
Catholic Church, for innocence. But at the same time
one cannot fail to notice the homosexual, sadistic element
in the lushness and tenderness of his epithets.

When he writes in the person of Hubert de Burgh:

180

FREDERICK ROLFE : A SPOILED PRIEST

‘They would not let me have my will (which was for the

life of a quiet clergyman) So once every day since

that time, I have cursed those monks out of a full heart %
one pities the spoiled priest; when he describes Arthur,

‘the proud gait of the stainless pure secure in himself,
wholly perfect in himself, severe with himself as with all,
strong in disgust of ill, utterly careless save to keep high,
clean, cold, armed, intact, apart, glistening with candid
candour both of heart and of aspect, like a flower, like a
maid, like a star,’

one recognizes the potential sanctity of the man, just as
one recognizes the really devilish mind which gives the
formula for a throat-cutting with the same relish as in his
book on the Borgias he had translated a recipe for cooking
a goose alive. He is an obvious example to illustrate Mr
T. S. Eliot’s remark in his study of the demonic
influence:

‘Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken
them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is
only when they are so awakened that they are capable of
real Good, but that at the same time they become first
capable of Evil.’

REMEMBERING MR JONES

This book* is as much a memorial to Edward Garnett
as to Conrad : a memorial to the greatest of all publishers’
readers, the man behind the scenes to whom we owe
Conrad’s works. A publisher’s claim to the discovery of
an author is suspect: it is the author who usually dis-
covers the publisher, and the publisher’s part is simply
to pay a reliable man to recognize merit when it is brought
to him by parcel-post. But we have Conrad’s own testi-
mony that had it not been for Edward Garnett’s tactfully
subdued encouragement he might never have written
another book after Almayer's Folly , and one suspects it
was Garnett who organized critical opinion so that Con-
rad had the support of his peers during the years of
popular neglect. As for Garnett himself nothing could
be more illuminating than his son’s biographical note.
Edward Garnett was brought up by parents who blended
‘Victorian respectability with complete liberality of
opinion. The children were undisciplined and completely
untidy; only when they exhibited anything like worldli-
ness or self-seeking were their parents surprised and
shocked.’

Conrad’s prefaces are not like James’s, an elaborate
reconstruction of technical aims. They are not prefaces
to which novelists will turn so frequently as readers : they
are about life as much as about art, about the words or the
actions which for one reason or another were excluded
from the novels — Almayer suddenly breaking out at
breakfast on the subject of the ambiguous Willems, then
on an expedition up-river with some Arabs, ‘One thing’s
certain; if he finds anything worth having up there they

* Comad* s Prefaces to Ms Works , with an essay by Edward
Garnett.

182

REMEMBERING MR JONES

will poison him like a dog 1 ; about the prototype of Mr
Jones of Victory :

‘Mr Jones (or whatever his name was) did not drift
away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out
of the room. It was in a little hotel in the Island of St
Thomas in the West Indies (in the year ’75) where we
found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs*
all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his im-
mobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome
significance. Our invasion must have displeased him be-
cause he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out*
leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin
shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was
the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I
said: “A professional sharper?” and got for answer:
“He’s a terror; but I must say that up to a certain point
he w r ill play fair ...” I wonder what that point was. I
never saw him again because I believe he went straight
on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
ports of call in the direction of Aspinall.’

They make an amusing comparison* these germs of
stories* anecdotes remarkable as a rule for their anarchy
(an appalling Negro in Haiti) or ambiguity (as when
Lord Jim passed across Conrad’s vision — ‘One sunny
morning in the commonplace surroundings of an eastern
roadstead, I saw his form pass by — appealing — significant
— under a cloud — perfectly silent’) — they make an
amusing comparison with those neat little dinner-table
stories which set James off constructing his more intricate
and deeper fictions* holding up his hand in deprecation
to prevent the whole story coming out (‘clumsy Life
again at her stupid work’), just as the settings are socially

183

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

widely dissimilar: Conrad on a small and dirty schooner
in the Gulf of Mexico listening to the ferocious Ricardo’s
low communings ‘with his familiar devil % while the old
Spanish gentleman to whom he served as confidant and
retainer lay dying ‘in the dark and unspeakable cudd’;
and James on Christmas Eve, before the table ‘that
glowed safe and fair through the brown London night’,
listening to the anecdotes of his ‘amiable friend’. It was
a strange fate which brought these two to settle within a
few miles of each other and produce from material
gained at such odd extremes of life two of the great
English novels of the last fifty years: The Spoils of
Poynton and Victory.

The thought would have pleased Conrad. It would
have satisfied what was left of his religious sense, and
that was little more than a distant memory of the Sanctus
bell and the incense. James spent his life working to-
wards and round the Catholic Church, fascinated and
repelled and absorbent ; Conrad was bora a Catholic and
ended — formally — in consecrated ground, but all he re-
tained of Catholicism was the ironic sense of an omni-
science and of the final unimportance of human life under
the watching eyes. Edward Garnett brings up again the
old legend of Slavic influence which Conrad expressly
denied. The Polish people are not Slavs and Conrad’s
similarity is to the French, once a Catholic nation, to the
author for example of La Condition Humaine : the rhetoric
of an abandoned faith. ‘ The mental degradation to which
a man’s intelligence is exposed on its way through life’:
‘the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil’: in
scattered phrases you get the memories of a creed work-
ing like poetry through the agnostic prose.

*937

184

THE DOMESTIC BACKGROUND

The domestic background is of interest: to know how a
writer with the peculiar sensitivity we call genius com-
promises with family life. There is usually some compro-
mise; few writers have had the ruthless egotism of Joseph
Conrad who, at the birth of his first child, delayed the
doctor whom he had been sent to fetch by sitting down
with him and eating a second breakfast. The trouble is
that a writer’s home, just as much as the world outside, is
his raw material. His wife’s or a child’s sickness : Conrad
couldn’t help unconsciously regarding them, as Henry
James regarded the germinal anecdote at the dinner
table, as something to cut short when he had had enough
human pain for his purpose. * Something human’, he put
as epigraph to one of his novels, quoting Grimm, ‘is
dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.’ But no
quotation more misrepresented him in his home, if Mrs
Conrad’s memory is accurate.* Out of a long marriage
she has remembered nothing tender, nothing considerate.
On her own part, yes; she is the heroine of every
anecdote.

It makes rather repellant reading, this long record of
slights, grievances, verbal brutalities. Is it a true portrait ?
We are dealing with a mind curiously naive (on one
occasion she refers to Edward Thomas in uniform, wear-
ing his khaki ‘without ostentation, but correct in every
detail’), unable to realize imaginatively her husband’s
devotion to his art, a mind peculiarly retentive of injuries.
The triviality of her attacks on Ford Madox Ford, for
example, is astonishing. For how many years has the
grievance over a laundry bill fermented in this not very
generous brain ? After a quarter of a century the feet that
* Joseph Conrad and Ms Circle 5 by Jessie Conrad.

185

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Henry James served Mrs HuefFer first at tea has not been
forgotten.

She writes of Ford that he has reviled Conrad ‘when
he is beyond the power of defending himself\ The truth
is that no one did more than Ford to preserve Conrad’s
fame, and no one has done more than Mrs Conrad to in-
jure it in this portrait she has drawn of a man monstrously
selfish, who grudged the money he gave his children,
who avoided responsibilities by taking to his bed, who
was unfaithful to her in his old age. Of this last story we
should have known nothing if it were not for Mrs Con-
rad’s dark hints and evasions here. ‘ I made no comment’ :
this is the phrase with which the story of his slights so
often ends. But I do not think she is conscious of its
complacency any more than she is conscious that the
phrase with which she describes herself at the end of her
book, one who has ‘the privilege and the immense satis-
faction of being regarded as the guardian of his memory’,
must seem to her readers either heartless or hypocritical.

It would be easy to cast doubt upon these ungram-
matical revelations (on one occasion her memory fails her
completely in the course of a paragraph). But there is
obviously no conscious dishonesty in the one-sided
record; the writer does not realize how damaging it is.
‘The dear form’, ‘the dear fellow’, ‘the beloved face’,
one need not believe that these are meaningless endear-
ments; it is simply that her mind is of a kind which
harbours slights more easily than acts of kindness. She
suffered — you cannot help believing that — suffered bit-
terly in this marriage, but it has never occurred to her
that Conrad suffered too:

‘From the sound next door (we have three rooms) I
186

THE PUBLIC LIFE

This record* of amazing energy, of dinners and cruises
and casinos and Blue Trains, of a life crammed with pub-
lic appearances and yet a life which found time in the
small hours before the first engagement for a literary
production of enormous quantity, is curiously reminis-
cent of James’s fantasy of The Private Life. James, it will
be remembered, was fascinated by his vision of Robert
Browning, the diner-out, with his "loud, sound, normal,
hearty presence, all bristling with prompt responses and
expected opinions and usual views and his other person-
ality 'who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and
wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things’.
And for comparison there was another figure in the
London of his time :

‘ that most accomplished of artists and most dazzling of
men of the world whose effect on the mind repeatedly
invited to appraise him was to beget in it an image of
representation and figuration so exclusive of any possible
inner self that, so far from there being here a question of
an alter ego , a double personality, there seemed scarce a
question of a real and single one, scarce foothold or mar-
gin for any private and domestic ego at all,’

One must not press the comparison with Browning or
Wilde too far, for Bennett was obviously a man of as much
greater honesty and human kindliness than the one as he
was a much smaller writer than the other. His engaging
vanity about his clothes (the shoes which cost five
guineas a pair) and the hotels he stayed in, his sometimes
rather absurd self-assurance ('I may say that I disagree

* Arnold Bennett's Letters to his Nephew Bichard Bennett .

188

THE PUBLIC LIFE

with Einstein’s theory of curved space’), were only
aspects of his honesty. He may have led as public a life
as Wilde’s, but he was not concerned, except in his super-
ficial vanities, with the appearance he made; he spoke of
what he thought whether it might damage him in the eyes
of the unsympathetic or not.

And unlike Browning’s his public life had become his
work: the huge hotels, the yachts, the zcagons-lits, the
company of millionaires and Cabinet Ministers: these
were his material. No writer has been more shaped by
success: genuinely shaped, for the literary conscience
which was nurtured on Flaubert never allowed him in
his serious work to write for the sake of popularity.
Popularity simply overtook him. For the public life was
not his first material — at the time of The Old Wives' Tale
— and he made one mysterious, because so unexpectedly
successful, return, away from Lord Raingo, to the people
for whom his sympathy had been deeper, who moved
his creative brain, perhaps because they belonged to his
earlier years, in a far more poetic manner, in Rxceyman
Steps .

In these letters, kindly, sympathetic, occasionally
harsh when he felt his nephew’s conduct needed improv-
ing socially , we read between the accounts of dinner
parties and theatre parties of a few early morning visits
to Cler ken well: to ‘get’ the scene of Riceyman Steps took
much less time than his exploration of the Savoy for
Imperial Hotel , perhaps because it connected, as that
excellent piece of documentary reporting did not, directly
with his imaginative experience.

Usually the documentary eye served him only too well.
Vivid descriptive informative writing came to him easily.
Again and again the character of places springs admirably

189

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

alive in Bennett’s letters but very seldom the character
of people. The documentary eye was always vivid: at
rehearsals — e The theatre is very large, very fine, and very
cold. A sort of Arctic hell’; driving home after the re-
strained riot of the Olympia Circus — c we came home with
the brougham full of hydrogen balloons, which occasion-
ally swept out on their strings through the window into
the infinite ether 9 ; noting the quality of the lemonade at
a dance hall; recording that Lord Rothermere’s house
had seventeen bathrooms. He had an unfailing interest
for the scene, and the scene in these letters is crammed
with properties, but one has a curious sense that this
kindly, honest, lovable man was its only living inhabitant,
as if popularity had robbed him of the only kind of
people he really, deeply, knew. In 1930 he recorded with
his usual innocent and candid pleasure that the publica-
tion of his Journal in the Daily Mail was making a c great
stir 9 , but one cannot help wondering where that stir was
to be noticed among the ’plane crashes and the un-
employed suicides, a year’s births and deaths, except
perhaps at Lord Raingo’s.

1936

190

GOATS AND INCENSE

My generation lived so long with the old Kipling that it
is hard for us to capture the first excitement of his con-
temporaries, that feeling for the amazing boy who came
from India and set the literary world aflame. It is one of
the virtues of Mr Carrington’s admirable biography that
through the care and the sobriety of his narrative we catch
the pulse of the legend.* After two hundred pages of
close writing Kipling has not yet in this biography
reached the age of thirty. By thirty he had written Plain
Tales From the Hills y Soldiers Three , Wee Willie Winkle,
The Light That Failed , Barrack Room Ballads , Many
Inventions) The Jungle Books: he had been accepted as an
equal by Stevenson and James — no wonder that at sixty-
one he seemed to Hugh Walpole already an old man on
the brink of second childhood: "A wonderful morning
with old Kipling in the Athenaeum. He was sitting sur-
rounded by the reviews of his new book, beaming like a
baby.’ He had been a "leading writer’ for more than the
span of most men’s literary lives.

There is no sensational surprise in Mr Carrington’s
Life. A full account of Kipling’s extraordinary quarrel
with Balestier, his American brother-in-law, and a fan-
tastic story of how a homicidal lunatic pursued him from
England to the Cape and back and finally ran Kipling to
earth on the steps of the Athenaeum — these are the un-
expected high lights. Those who anticipated intimate
revelations, perhaps of the Anglo-Indian order, had mis-
taken Kipling’s reporting talent for direct personal
experience. His prose, unlike his poetry, has not lasted
well and the tricks of the reporter are apparent even in

* Rudyard KipHng, His Life and Work) by Charles Carrington.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the few stories that still have the power to excite or move
— The Man Who Would Be King , Without Benefit of
Clergy .

Our memories are so much more satisfactory than the
reality. Even The Finest Story in the World no longer
seems quite true. One had remembered the description
of a leaking ship in a still sea given by the man who had
gone down in her, how the water-level paused for an
instant ‘ere’ it fell on the deck. But now one notices how
Kipling spoilt his effect with typical bravado. ‘He had
paid everything except the bare life for this little value-
less piece of knowledge, and I had travelled ten thousand
weary miles to meet him and take his knowledge at
second-hand.’

Even The Man Who Would Be King seems marred
today, after its magnificent opening, by the description of
Freemasonry (that King Charles’s head) in an* Afghan
tribe.

There is almost an inability to experience truly:
observation is ruined time and again by the pretence of
personal emotion.

‘The horror, the confusion, and the separation of the
murderer from his comrades were all over before I came.
There remained only on the barrack square the blood of
a man calling from the ground. The hot sun had dried it
to a dusky goldbeater’s-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise
by the heat; and as the wind rose each lozenge, rising a
little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’

It is one of the most famous openings in Kipling, and
how shoddy it is today, apart from the one brilliantly
realized scrap of description. ‘The blood of man calling

GOATS AND INCENSE

from the ground’ apparently with ‘a dumb tongue’ —
always in his prose he protests too much. He is deter-
mined to ‘make his story stand up’, like any Express
reporter; he calls on emotions which are not really
there.

‘Then who should come to tuck him up for the night
but the mother ? And she sat down on the bed, and they
talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there
is to be any future for our empire. With a simple woman’s
deep guile she asked questions and suggested answers
that should have waked some sign in the face on the
pillow, but there was neither quivei of eyelid nor quicken-
ing of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she
blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not
always a mother’s property ’

A

Surely Tinker Bell danced when Kipling was bom. Of
greatly gifted writers perhaps the two who have written
with most falsity of human relations are Barrie and Kip-
ling. We know more of Barrie’s private failure: we only
get a hint of Kipling’s in that long drawn feud with his
brother-in-law Balestier, the inability to realize another
man’s feelings. False poetidsms, the exaggerated use of
technical phrases which make some of his later stories
incomprehensible to the reader who has not picked the
brains of a ship’s designer or an engine-room hand,
scraps of Biblical English, the overpowering shyness of
the schoolboy intellectual who doesn’t want to admit to
the hearties of the prefect’s room that he really takes
literature seriously — as the years pass we see how the
young man never grew up and how patchily in prose his
promise was realized.

13 — OB.G.G. 193

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

To me there is only one story. The Miracle of Pimm
Bhagaty in which Kipling does control his enormous
capacity for play, play with images, phrases, the sound of
vowels. The bravado, the knowingness, the caste-
prejudices, the qualities which so often made him intrude
a second-rate phrase to express a second-rate mood, are
absent. In this story of an Indian hermit, once the Prime
Minister of his State, there is a dignity of subject which
compels him to write with the simple verbal music of the
master he should always have been:

* Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean
and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village
of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung
to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay
out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the moun-
tain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the
smooth stone circles of the threshing floors/

Oddly it was in poetry — and often in occasional poetry
at that — that Kipling reached maturity. Even at his most
popular, in such poems as “The Song of the Banjo”, we
realize the extent of his mastery when we read his imita-
tors. Here he has enlarged the scope of English poetry to
include the outer, the un-English world. In so much of
Canadian and Australian poetry of his time the exotic
tree, the bird with the italicized name, the mugwump —
if such exists — stuck out of the verse, less absorbed by
the imagination than Carroll’s slithy toves. In Kipling’s
poetry the exotic is naturalized: we only notice the
stranger a long while after he has gone.

In the desert where the dung-fed camp smoke curled .

194

GOATS AND INCENSE

Day long the diamond weather.

The high, unaltered blue ,

The smell of goats and incense . . .

And the lisp of the split banana frond . « .

But perhaps Kipling never wrote better than when he
wrote out of hate, and poetry is a better medium for
hatred than prose. In his prose — in such a crude story for
example as The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat
— his victims are unworthy of his obsession. For hatred
is an obsession, hatred confines, hatred is monotonous —
Dryden and Pope drove it as far and sometimes a little
farther than it will go. Kipling was their worthy succes-
sor. Who cares now for the subject of MacFlecknoe ?
We read it for the accurate statement of Dryden’s own
mood. So too we are no longer interested in the fact that
a British Government some time in the first decade of
our century contemplated a joint naval demonstration
with Germany against Venezuela, but Kipling’s poem is
the picture of a mind in hate and we can read it still. The
Marconi Scandal, because of the distinction of the ac-
cused, may still have an interest, but what was that
Declaration of London on June 29, 191 1, apparently just
after the Coronation which so roused Kipling’s bitterness
against Government and Parliament? It doesn’t matter:
the stupid bullish victim is secondary to the sword and
the cape of the slayer.

We were all one heart and one race
When the Abbey trumpets blew .

For a moment's breathing space
We had forgotten you .

195

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Now you return to your honoured place
Panting to shame us anew .

It is the fate of a good biographer that the reviewer
neglects him for random reflections on his subject, Mr
Carrington’s is a very good biography — we are not left,
as we so often are when we have closed an official life,
with the thought, 'At least here is a quarry where other
men in the future may dig more profitably.’ Mr Carring-
ton has dug with effect: the quarry is exhausted, and, as
Kipling would have wished, future writers need concern
themselves only with the work.

1956

196

SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

i

‘A writer 5 , Somerset Maugham declared in these
* variations on some Spanish themes % 4 is not made by one
book, but by a body of work. It will not be of equal value ;
his books will be tentative while he is learning the tech-
nique and developing his powers; and if, as most writers
do, for it is a healthy occupation, he lives too long, his
later work will show the decline due to advancing years,
but there will be a period during which he will bring
forth what he had it in him to bring forth in the perfec-
tion of which he is capable . 5 To this last-mentioned
period Don Fernando belongs; it is Maugham’s best
book.

It will be an unexpected book for those to whom
Maugham still primarily means: adultery in China,
murder in Malaya, suicide in the South Seas, the
coloured violent stories which have so appreciably raised
the level of the popular magazine. But there is a more
important Mr Maugham than that: the shrewd critical
humane observer of Cakes and Ale> of the best Ashenden
stories, of the preface to the collected tales. The charac-
teristic most evident in these books and in Don Fernando
is honesty. It has emerged slowly out of the cynical and
romantic past; there are passages in The Trembling of a
Leaf and The Painted Veil which Maugham must have
found acutely embarrassing to remember, and it is inter-
esting to learn in Don Fernando that Maugham’s
extensive knowledge of Spanish literature was accumula-
ted when he was young, to provide him with material for
a romantic Juanesque novel which he never wrote.
Instead of Don Juan then we have Don Fernando, the
innkeeper and curio dealer who forced Maugham un~

197

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

willingly to buy an old life of Ignatius Loyola, and it is
with this life that his study of old Spain starts.

The contrast is peculiarly piquant between the opu-
lence of the material (the fierce asceticisms of Loyola and
St Peter of Alcantara, the conceits of Lope de Vega, the
ribaldry of the picaresque novelists, the food and the
architecture and the painters of Spain, the grim bright
goaty land) and Maugham’s honest unenthusiastic mind.
I do not mean pedantic or unimaginative. Honesty is a
form of sensitivity, and you need a very sensitive ear to
detect in the verbose plays of Calderon ‘faintly audible,
while this or the other is happening, the sinister drums
of unseen powers’. One may smile at the idea of
Maugham doing one of Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’
and finding it extremely severe (T thought I was going
to be sick’), but it is that quality of honest experience
which gives his style such vividness.

‘Tarragona has a cathedral that is grey and austere,
very plain, with immense, severe pillars; it is like a fort-
ress; a place of worship for headstrong, violent and cruel
men. The night falls early within its walls and then the
columns in the aisles seem to squat down on themselves
and darkness shrouds the Gothic arches. It terrifies you.
It is like a dungeon. I was there last on a Monday in Holy
Week, and from the pulpit a preacher was delivering a
Lenten sermon. Two or three naked electric globes
threw a cold light that cut the outline of the columns

against the darkness as though with scissors Each

angry, florid phrase was like a blow and one blow fol-
lowed another with vicious insistence. From the farthest
end of the majestic church, winding about the columns
and curling round the groining of the arches, down the

198

SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

great austere nave, and along the dungeon-like aisles, the
rasping, shrewish voice pursued you.’

Don Fernando may be superficially discursive;
Maugham is in turns critic, tourist, biographer (to find
short lives as shrewd and amusing we must go back to
Anthony h Wood and Aubrey), but he is working steadily
forward towards the statement of his main argument:
‘It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of
this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one
end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they
excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art — in
man.’ To that man Maugham has rendered the highest
kind of justice, whether he is the playwright of artificial
situations or the unknown sailor who, when the Armen-
ian bishop, Martyr, begged a passage, replied, ‘ I will take
him in my ship; but tell him I go to range the universal
sea.’

2

Somerset Maugham’s short stories are so well-known
that a reviewer may be forgiven for dwelling chiefly on
the preface which Maugham contributed to the collected
tales. It is a delightfully ‘sensible’ essay on the short
story, and the more valuable because it represents a point
of view not common to many English writers* English
short-story writers of any merit of recent years have
followed Chekov rather than Maupassant.

Maugham is a writer of great deliberation even when
his style is most careless (‘burning mouth’, ‘nakedness
of soul’, ‘mouth like a scarlet wound’); he will never.

*99

KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

one feels, lose his head; he has a steady point of view.
The banality of the phrases I have noted do not indicate
an emotional abandonment; they indicate a rather blas6
attitude towards the details of his stories; narrative is
something which has to be got through before the point
of his anecdote appears, and Maugham is sometimes a
little bored and off-hand in the process. The anecdote to
Maugham is very nearly everything; the anecdote, and
not the characters, not the ‘atmosphere’, not the style, is
primarily responsible for conveying Maugham’s attitude;
and it is the anecdote as contrasted with spiritual analysis,
Maupassant with Chekov, that he discusses in his preface
with great justice to the opposite school.

*1 do not know that anyone but Chekov has so
poignantly been able to represent spirit communing with
spirit. It is this that makes one fed that Maupassant in
comparison is obvious and vulgar. The strange, the ter-
rible thing is that, looking at man in their different ways,
these two great writers, Maupassant and Chekov, saw eye
to eye. One was content to look upon flesh, while the other,
more nobly and subtly, surveyed the spirit; but they
agreed that life was tedious and insignificant and that
men were base, unintelligent and pitifuL’

This comes very generously from a disciple of Maupas-
sant, and Maugham’s praise of his master is never exag-
gerated. ‘Maupassant’s stories are good stories. The
anecdote is interesting apart from the narration, so that
it would secure attention if it were told over the dinner
table; and that seems to me a very great merit indeed.’
The best of Maugham’s stories too are anecdotes, the

200

SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

best are worthy of Maupassant, and his failure really to
reach Maupassant’s rank is partly his failure to stick to
the anecdote. Too many of his short stories sprawl into
the proper region of the novel. Take for example The
Pooh where the scene changes from the South Seas to
Scotland and back to the South Seas, where the action
covers years, and of which the subject is the marriage
of white and half-caste. Nor did Maupassant’s prefer-
ence for the anecdote imply a method which Maugham
finds only too necessary: the method of the ‘yam’, of
the first person singular. He defends the convention
ably in his preface, but in a collected volume the mono-
tony of the method becomes apparent. One has only to
remember how this convention of the first person was
transformed by Conrad, to realize a strange limitation to
Maugham’s interest in his craft.

This air of being at ease in a Sion which he so candidly
and rightly despises is rather pronounced in his defence
of the popular magazines. As he explains in his preface,
he came to the short story late in his career, he was al-
ready well known as a dramatist, and it is not surprising
that his stories have always been welcomed by the
magazines. His good fortune has blinded him to the
demands which the popular magazine makes on less
famous writers. When he remarks: Tt has never been
known yet that a good writer was unable to write his best
owing to the conditions under which alone he could gain
a public for his work % he has been misled, I think, by his
own success. Writers belonging to a less easily apprecia-
ted school than the anecdotal, who depend for their
market on the intellectual magazine, are lucky if they can
earn twenty pounds by a short story, while the writer who
fits the taste of the popular magazine may well earn ten

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

times that sum.* It is seldom that financial worry is a
condition for the best work.

3

Kinglake once referred to ‘that nearly immutable law
which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be utter-
ing every now and then some sentiment not his own and
compared an author with a French peasant under the old
regime , bound to perform a certain amount of work upon
the public highways. I doubt if any author has done — of
recent years — less highway labour than Maugham. I say
‘of recent years’ because, as he himself admits in this
summing-up of his life and work,f he passed like other
writers through the stage of tutelage — and to the most
unlikely people, the translators of the Bible and Jeremy
Taylor. That stage lasted longer with Maugham than
with most men of equal talent — there is at the heart of his
work a humility and a self-distrust rather deadening in
their effects, and his stories as late as The Painted Veil
were a curious mixture of independent judgement, when
he was dealing with action, and of cliches, when he was
expressing emotion.

An author of talent is his own best critic — the ability
to criticize his own work is inseparably bound up with
his talent: it is his talent, and Maugham defines his limi-
tations perfectly: ‘I knew that I had no lyrical quality. I
had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make
to enlarge it much availed me. I had little gift of meta-
phor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to
me’, and in a passage — which is an excellent example of

* I was writing in 1934.

f The Summing-Up.

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SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

his hard-won style at its best, clear, colloquial, honest —
he relates his limitations to his character:

‘It did not seem enough merely to write. I wanted to
make a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an
essential element, but which would include all the other

activities proper to man I had many disabilities. I

was small; I had endurance but little physical strength;
I stammered; I was shy; I had poor health. I had no
facility for games, which play so great a part in the nor-
mal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of
these reasons or from nature I do not know, an instinctive
shrinking from my fellow-men that has made it difficult
for me to enter into any familiarity with them. . . .
Though in the course of years I have learned to assume
an air of heartiness when forced into contact with a
stranger, I have never liked anyone at first sight. I do
not think I have ever addressed someone I did not know
in a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on
board ship unless he first spoke to me. . . . These are
grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I
have had to make the best of them. I think it was the
best I could hope for in the circumstances and with
the very limited powers that were granted to me by
nature/

Tt did not seem enough to me merely to write’, and
even in this personal book the author is unwilling to
communicate more than belongs to his authorship; he
does not, like a professional autobiographer, take us with
commercial promptitude into his confidence. His life has
contained material for dramatization, and he has used it
for fiction. There is the pattern in his writing and we are

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

not encouraged to look for its reverse in life: the hospital
career (the public pattern is in Liza of Lambeth ); the
secret agent in Geneva (we can turn to Ashenden ); the
traveller — there are many books. The sense of privacy,
so rare and attractive a quality in an author, deepens in
the bare references to secret service experiences in Russia,
just before the Revolution, of which we find no direct
trace in his stories.

The nearest Maugham comes to a confidence is in the
description of his religious belief— if you can call agnosti-
cism a belief, and the fact that on this subject he is ready
to speak to strangers makes one pause. There are signs of
muddle, contradictions . . . hints of an inhibition. Other-
wise one might trace here the deepest source of his limi-
tations, for creative art seems to remain a function of the
religious mind. Maugham the agnostic is forced to
minimize — pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen.
He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot
therefore believe in the importance of a human action.
Tt is not difficult % he writes, ‘to forgive people their
sins’ — it sounds like charity, but it may be only con-
tempt. In another passage he refers with understandable
scorn to writers who are ‘grandiloquent to tell you
whether or not a little trollop shall hop into bed with a
commonplace young man’. That is a plot as old as
Troilus and Cressida, but to the religious sixteenth-
century mind there was no such thing as a commonplace
young man or an unimportant sin ; the creative writers of
that time drew human characters with a clarity we have
never regained (we had to go to Russia for it later) be-
cause they were lit with the glare and significance that
war lends. Rob human beings of their heavenly and their
infernal importance, and you rob your characters of their

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SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

individuality. (‘What should a Socialist woman do ?’) It
has never been Maugham’s characters that we have
remembered so much as the narrator, with his contempt
for human life, his unhappy honesty.

1935-8

205

THE TOWN OF MALGUDI

The financial expert’s office was under a banyan tree:
his office furniture an old tin box. From the first pages of
Mr Narayan’s novel The Financial Expert we are back in
the town of Malgudi with which for nearly twenty years
we have been as familiar as with our own birthplace. We
know, like the streets of childhood, Market Road, the
snuff stalls, the vendors of toothpaste, Lawley Extension
with its superior villas, the Regal Haircutting Saloon,
the river, the railway. We expect at any moment to see
the Bachelor of Arts waving a long farewell to a friend from
the platform, small Swami wrapped in his adventurous
dreams coming down Market Road, Mr Sampath at the
door of his dubious film studio. It is through their friendly
offices that we have been able to meet these new —
and rather doubtful — characters : Margayya, the financial
expert himself, who graduates from the banyan tree to
publishing, and back to more elaborate and more crooked
banking (but how innocent is all his crookedness); Dr
Pal, ‘journalist, correspondent and author’; and Mar-
gayya’s son Balu whose progress from charming child-
hood to spoilt frustrated manhood is perhaps the saddest
episode Mr Narayan has written.

All Mr Narayan’s comedies have had this undertone of
sadness. Their gentle irony and absence of condemnation
remind us how difficult comedy is in the West today —
farce, savage, boisterous, satirical, is easy, but comedy
needs a strong framework of social convention with which
the author sympathizes but which he does not share. Miss
Compton-Bumett is forced to place her stories in the
Edwardian or Victorian past; Mr Henry Green substi-
tutes elaborate conventions of his own for our social
vacancies, so that his characters move in the kind of dance

206

THE TOWN OF MALGUDI

we learnt at kindergarten — 5 one step forward, one step to
the right, twirl on the right toe’. But the life of Malgudi
—never ruffled by politics— proceeds in exactly the same
way as it has done for centuries, and the juxtaposition
of the age-old convention and the modem character
provides much of the comedy. The astrologer is still
called in to examine the horoscopes for a marriage, but
now if you pay him enough he will fix them the way
you want: the financial expert sits under his banyan tree
opposite the new Central Co-operative Land Mortgage
Bank. To push away a tumbler of milk is to insult a
goddess ; the caste of a great-grandfather is still of great
importance. Margayya, astute about mortgages, con-
sumed by the modem desire for wealth and motorcars,
yet consults the priest of the Goddess Lakshmi and finds
himself seeking a red lotus to pound up in the milk drawn
from a smoke-coloured cow (the forty days of prayer have
results: he becomes the owner of a pornographic manu-
script called first Bed Life or the Science of Marital Happi-
ness but afterwards, through the caution of the printer.
Domestic Harmony ).

Margayya — the sad ambitious absurd financial expert
— is perhaps the most engaging of all Mr Narayan’s
characters. In his ambitions for his boy, his huge dreams,
his unintended villainies and his small vanities, his
domestic tenderness, he has the hidden poetry and the
unrecognized pathos we so often find in Chekov’s
characters who on the last page vanish into life . 4 He knew
that he had a scheme somewhere at the back of his mind,
a scheme which would place him among the elect in
society, which would make people flock to him and look
to him for guidance, advice and management. He could
not yet say what the scheme would be, but he sensed its

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KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

presence ... he felt he ought to wait on that inspiration
with reverence and watchfulness.’

Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi? That is the
thought that comes to me when I close a novel of Mr
Narayan’s. I am not waiting for another novel. I am wait-
ing to go out of my door into those loved and shabby
streets and see with excitement and the certainty of
pleasure a stranger approaching, past the bank, the
cinema, the hair cutting saloon, a stranger who will greet
me, I know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase
that will open a door on to yet another human existence.

1952

208

rider HAGGARD’S SECRET

How seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a
debt of gratitude except to the great or the fashionable,
who are like those friends that we feel do us credit
Conrad, Dostoevsky, James, yes, but we are too ready to
forget such figures as A. E. W. Mason, Stanley Weyman,
and Rider Haggard, perhaps the greatest of all who en-
chanted us when we were young. Enchantment is just
what this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds
that thir ty years have been unable to wear away: the
witch Gagool screaming as the rock-door closed and
crushed her; Eric Brighteyes fighting his doomed batde;
the death of the tyrant Chaka; Umslopagaas holding the
queen’s stairway in Milosis. It is odd how many violent
images remain like a prophecy of the future; the love
passages were quickly read and discarded from the mind,
though now they seem oddly moving (as when Queen
Nyleptha declares her love to Sir Henry Curtis in the
midnight hall), a litde awkward and stilted perhaps, but
free fr om amb iguities and doubts, and with the worn
rhetoric of honesty.

I am glad that his daughter’s vivid and well-written
biography* leaves Rider Haggard where he was in the
imagination: the tall bearded figure with the presence of
Sir Henry Curtis and the straightforwardness of Quater-
m,m This life does not belong to the unhappy world of
letters; there are no rivalries, jealousies, nerve storms, no
miling miserably against the grain, no ignoble ambivalent
vision which finds a kind of copy even in personal grief.
The loss of his only son in childhood nearly broke Hag-
gard in middle life, but yet his grief had the common
direct quality: he was not compelled to watch himself

* The Cloak that I Left , by Lilias Rider Haggard.

209

I4—C.E.G.G.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

turn it into words. ‘Jock was dead, so he mustn’t be
mentioned’. Sir Godfrey Haggard writes.

‘To come on a book or a toy that once belonged to my
young cousin (whom I never knew) was to strike a hush
over the room such as might almost have been observed
towards a relative who had been hanged for murder.
There was a guilty silence. Jock haunted the house far
more obtrusively because everyone there pretended they
could not see him, and the poor schoolboy wraith seemed
to be begging piteously for some notice, so that at last he
might be laid to rest.’

A few words from Allan Quatermain on how the joy of
life had left him with his son’s death — ‘ I have just buried
my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom I was so proud,
and my heart is broken. It is very hard having only one
son to lose him thus; but God’s will be done. Who am I
that I should complain?’ This is all Haggard allowed
himself. He was a public author and the private life re-
mained the private life in so far as he could control it.

The poetic element in Haggard’s work breaks out
where the control fails. Because the hidden man was so
imprisoned, when he does emerge it is against enormous
pressure through the tomb, and the effect is often one of
horror, a risen Lazarus — next time he must be buried
deeper. Perhaps that is why some of his early readers
found his work obscene (it seems incredible to us). An
anonymous letter-writer wrote to him:

‘As regards She* it is a tissue of the most sickening
trash that was ever printed, the only parts worth reading

210

EIDER HAGGARD’S SECRET

are borrowed — I could quote the books if I liked. None
but a foul-minded liar could invent such sickening
details. I trace a good deal of the diabolical murders that
have been lately committed to the ideas promulgated by
your foul trash. Of course, it pays and you don’t care a
damn, nevertheless the opinion of the decent public is
that you are a skunk and a very foul one.’

Even of King Solomon's Mines another anonymous cor-
respondent wrote; ‘We approached this book with feel-
ings of curiosity — we left with those of loathing and
disgust.’

It is simple to trace the influence of the public life on
his work, the public life of the boy as well as of the man.
There is, for example, a neighbouring fanner, ‘a long
lank man in a smocked frock, called Quatermain’. In
Zululand, where he went whilst still a boy on the staff of
the Governor of Natal, he met Gagool in the body (we
suspect he had met her in the spirit long before).
Pag6te’s warriors are performing a war dance. ‘Suddenly
there stood before us a creature, a woman — tiny,
withered, and bent nearly double by age, but in her
activity passing comprehension. Clad in a strange jumble
of snake skins, feathers, furs and bones, a forked wand in
her outstretched hand, she rushed to and fro before the
little group of white men, crying:

OUy OUy Aiy Aty Aty

Oh ! ye warriors that shall dame before the
great ones of the earthy come /

Oh ! ye dyers of spear Sy ye plumed suckers of
bloody come !

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NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

4 the witch finder ;

4 the wise woman;

4 the seer of strange sights;

4 the reader of dark thoughts; call ye !

Umslopagaas with the great hole in his head above the
left temple, carrying his spiked axe Imkosi-kaas, came
down one day from Swaziland and became Haggard’s
friend. All through his life we can find superficial material
for his books, even for the dull adult books like Mr.
Meeson's Will. His life provides Zulu impis, war, flight,
shipwreck, a treasure hunt in Mexico, even the City of
London, but what we do not so easily detect is the very
thing that makes these books live today with undimin-
ished vitality — the emergence of the buried man.

There are some revealing passages in his friendship
with Rudyard Kipling. Fishing together for trout at
Bateman’s, these two elderly men — in some ways the
most successful writers of their time, linked together to
their honour even by their enemies ( c the prose that knows
no reason, and the unmelodious verse’, ‘When the
Rudyards cease from Kipling, and the Haggards ride no
more’), suddenly let out the secret. T happened to re-
mark’, Haggard wrote, ‘that I thought this world was
one of the hells. He replied he did not think — he was
certain of it. He went on to show that it had every
attribute of hell; doubt, fear, pain, struggle, bereavement,
almost irresistible temptations springing from the nature
with which we are clothed, physical and mental suffering,
etc., ending in the worst fate man can devise for man.
Execution!’

Haggard’s comment starts shockingly from the page
in its very casualness, and then we begin to remember

RIDER HAGGARD’S SECRET

the passages we skated so Ughtlv over in the adventure
stories when we were young and the world hdd promise:
there was, for example, Allan Quatermain dying and
resigned:

4 Well, it is not a good world — nobody can say that it is,
save those who wilfully blind themselves to the facts.
How can a world be good in which Money is the moving
power, and Self-Interest the guiding star ? The wonder
is not that it is so bad but that there should be any good
left in it . 5

Quatermain remembers the good things of life, how he
'watched the wild game trek down to the water in the
moonlight. But I should not wish to live again.’ And we
remember too the Brethren and the quite casual comment,
not unlike Haggard’s to Kipling, 'So they went, talking
earnestly of all things, but, save in God, finding no hope
at all . 5

They seemed so straightforward to us once, those
books we first encountered behind the steel grille of the
school library, casting a glow over the dull neighbouring
H 5 $: Henty already abandoned and Hope not yet en-
joyed: The Wanderer's Necklace (with the hero blinded
by the queen to whom he remains faithful to the last),
Montezuma's Daughter (and her suicide beside her lover),
Ayesha (with the mad Khan’s hunting), Nada the Lily
(and the death of the beloved). We did not notice the
melancholy end of every adventure or know that the
battle scenes took their tension from the fear of death
which so haunted Haggard from one night in his child-
hood when he woke in the moonlight:

'He put out his hand . . . how odd it looked in the

213

KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

moonlight, dead — dead. Then it happened. He realized
that one day that hand would be limp also, that he could
not lift it any more — it would be dead — he would be dead.
The awful, inescapable certainty hung over him like a
pall of misery. He felt it would be better if he died at
once — he wished he were dead, rather than have to live
with that in front of him . 5

Haggard’s own melancholy end, with falling royalties
and the alienation of the Norfolk lands he loved, depart-
ing from the doomed house with a flower in his button-
hole to the operation he guessed would be final, comes
closer to adult literature perhaps than any of his books.
It is not the sound of Umslopagaas’s axe that we hear,
cracking the marble monument in the moment of his
death, so much as the sound of trees falling, the strokes
of the axe far away in the cherry orchard. We think again
of how much we loved him when we were young — the
gleam of Captain Good’s monocle, the last stand of the
Greys, de Garcia tracked through the snows — and of
how litde we knew. * Occasionally one sees the Light, one
touches the pierced feet, one thinks that the peace which
passes understanding is gained — then all is gone again/
Could we ever have believed that our hero wrote that, or
have been interested if we had known ?

1951

214

JOURNEY INTO SUCCESS

Why is it, one asks about certain authors, in a kind of
envy of their talent and in the belief that, if one had been
given so much, one could have progressed a little further,
they have stayed just there ? Why didn’t they grow, with
such a technical start — well, a little more worthy of con-
sideration ?

A. E. W. Mason was an admirable writer of detective
stories — the modem fairy tales — and of such period
pieces as Clementina and The Watchers which excited us
when we were young and still hold a nostalgic charm.
The year 17x9, the country Italy, a vagrant Irishman
with a lame horse, an early autumn morning, and a
beautiful young woman in need of a postilion — he could
do all this as cleverly as Weyman and his dialogue was
sharper and better timed. How could a boy’s attention be
more swiftly caught than by the opening of The Watchers ?

‘It was a story of a youth that sat in the stocks of a
Sunday morning and disappeared thereafter from the
islands; of a girl named Helen ; of a Negro who slept, and
of men watching a house with a great tangled garden that
stood at the edge of the sea.’

One is reminded of another writer who began in much
the same way, but when he died in his early forties had
reached the height of Weir of Herrmston. Mason lived
till old age, and perhaps, if we had been young when it
appeared. Fire Over England might have seemed to us as
satisfying as Clementina. But readers grow up and it is
sad when an author does not grow up with them.
Literature has no room for Peter Pans.

2x5

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

In Air Green's workaday biography* we seek an answer
to the problem : why did he not progress like Stevenson ?
We read of a young Alason, the son of a chartered account-
ant in Camberwell, and his education at Dulwich — a
long way from General Faversham's old house in Surrey
with the portraits of the military ancestors on the walls,
and a long way, too, from the courteous monocled member
of the Garrick, a leading social figure who shot in North
Africa and yachted in the Mediterranean and discussed
his novels with the King. (At George the Fifth's request,
Mason temporarily abandoned a novel on Koenigsmark
and, perhaps as a reward for his loyalty, was offered a
knighthood. This eminently suitable honour, which had
been accepted by his friends Anthony Hope and James
Barrie, he turned down for the rather confused reason
that he was a childless man.) Between the not very happy
Camberwell boy and the first-nighter cartooned by Tom
Titt lay Oxford and the stage and failure as an actor.
Trinity wiped out the middle-class stain, but perhaps
the stage gave Mason a fear of failure: failure in a sense
would have been a return to Camberwell.

So from the moment that he began writing we feel his
great talent bent on success — not just ugly commercial
success, but the success of esteem, the esteem of those he
considered his peers. Unfortunately, he had the modesty
of a good fellow rather than the pride of the artist and he
rated himself too low. Yeats decided to c dine at journey's
end with Landor and with Donne' : in the celestial dub
Mason would not have seated himself higher than the
author of The Dolly Dialogues or Quiller-Couch. It is as
if his journey into success, social and financial, had not
allowed him time for thought, thought about the tech-
* A. E. W. Mason , by Roger Lancelyn Green.

216

JOURNEY INTO SUCCESS

nique of his profession, thought even about its values.
‘Hardy had dropped out of his Pantheon, but the greater
understanding took in Victor Hugo now and a full
appreciation of Trollope’s Barchester novels, with Hugh
Walpole’s series as a pendant.’ It will be seen that his
biographer shares the uncertain ‘understanding’ of his
subject. Mr Green refers to the ‘immortal’ Beau Geste,
to ‘that superannuated classic’ (odd phrase) Pkra, the
Egyptian, to ‘a first-class writer, Mr R. C. Sherriff’, and
to Musk and Amber, ‘ the uttermost pinnacle of (Mason’s)
every power ... the perfection of restraint ... the sheer
poetry’. What words has Mr Green left if he comes to
deal with literature? Mason is interesting enough to
deserve criticism, and this is the language of advertising.

Financial success — and the applause of those he con-
sidered his peers — came to Mason very quickly, with his
second novel. How deliberately he sought it can be read
in his biography. ‘Not feeling that the novel of contem-
porary manners and the psychological dissection of
rather trivial characters demanded in such a work’ (this
is only one of Mr Green’s critical non sequiturs ) ‘was
quite in his line. Mason cast about for new ground —
and ground from which might spring a quick and wide-
spread success. He read the works of that day’s most
popular story-teller, Stanley Weyrnan. . . . and decided
that in the realms of historical fiction lay his most likely
province.’ (The italics are mine.)

Writing novels was not a career— it was an element in
his career: an aid in leading his full bachelor life. One has
the impression of a man who never surrendered himself,
life touched him only from across the footlights. We
remember Conrad struggling with a novel in lodgings
while his small son lay dangerously ill in the next room.

217

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

the agony of his divided allegiances, but there were no
allegiances to bring Mason painfully in touch with the
ordinary emotions of his fellows. From the evidence pro-
vided by his biography (the death of a young secretary
seems to have been his worst pain) a succession of light
flirtations took the place of a wife or mistress. Even his
participation in the First World War had a touch of the
old Lyceum about it: Major Mason of the Secret Service
sailing around the Mediterranean, intercepting anthrax
germs, in Mexico stealing the audion lamps (whatever
they may be) from a German-operated wireless station*
He must have been a happy man and we do not grudge
him his happiness. He has given most of us a lot of happi-
ness at one stage of our lives. But if only, with so much
skill and invention, he had been involved; if only he had
worked at his craft.

I have been re-reading his most popular book. The
Four Feathers . It is a study of fear, the fear of cowardice.
The illustration he has chosen, a general’s son, heir to a
long line of military ancestors, brought up for the Service,
is an obvious and conventional one, but the story still
holds us for a few lazy hours. Indeed, I think I liked it
better than I did as a boy. Unlike the film adaptations
most of the story takes place in England, off-stage, and I
remember that when I was fifteen I wanted to skip all
those pages of love and misunderstanding. The boy was
bored by what the adult can’t quite swallow. And yet the
book has many merits : the military mind of the parent is
critically regarded. There are — in so conventional a story
— unexpected notes of harshness: the girl who presents
her lover with the fourth white feather of cowardice
hates his three comrades who started the cruel affair and
rejoices when one is killed in the Sudan. These are the

218

JOURNEY INTO SUCCESS

touches of reality which force us today to read on, and
which make it, I think, a better book than its dose kin.
The Light that Failed . But the dialogue is hopelessly un-
real: it is there to advance the story and not to express
character. When the hero is delirious in the Omdurman
prison, his feverish utterances are sufficiently ludd and
chronological to explain to the man he has come to
rescue all the events leading to his capture. It is as if the
author had an urgent appointment to keep when the
story was done, and he must take the easiest way to reach
the end. His task finished (and his MS was like a clean
copy) there was mountaineering in the Alps, during the
autumn a 2,000-acre shoot, a trip to South Africa. One
remembers Conrad writing: ‘It’s late. I am tired after a
day of uphill toil. Now it is always uphill with me. And
the worst is one doesn’t seem any nearer the top when the
day is done/ One doubts whether Mason would have
understood. They had set themselves different summits.

1952

219

ISIS IDOL

‘One break comes every year in my quiet life. Then I go
to Dresden, and there I am met by my dear friend and
companion, Fritz von Tarlenheim. Last time, his pretty
wife Helga came, and a lusty crowing baby with her. And
for a week Fritz and I are together, and I hear all of what
falls out in Strelsau; and in the evenings, as we walk and
smoke together, we talk of Sapt, and of the King, and
often of young Rupert; and, as the hours grow small, at
last we speak of Flavia. For every year Fritz carries with
him to Dresden a little box ; in it lies a red rose, and round
the stalk of the rose is a slip of paper with the words
written: “Rudolf— Flavia — always 55 . 5

So The Prisoner of Zenda ended. How one swallowed it
all at the age of fourteen, the clever, brittle sentiment of a
novel that has been made a schoolbook in Egypt, has been
serialized in Japan, which has been filmed and staged
time and again. Now it begins to fade out, like the ghost
‘with a melodious twang 5 .

There is a true Edwardian air about The Prisoner of
Zenda , Phroso and The Dolly Dialogues ; and they may
still survive awhile as period pieces. If one had tried,
without Sir Charles Mallet’s help,* to imagine the author
surely one would have hit on this frontispiece: the long
well-bred nose, the pointed legal face, the top hat gleam-
ing in the late summer sun, the silver-headed cane, and the
chair beside the Row. Ladies with large picture-hats
slant off under the trees towards Hyde Park Comer. The
author is amused ; he has just come up to town from Lady
Battersea’s; he is composing a light whimsical letter on
the latest political move and his own idleness to the

* Anthony Hope and His Books , by Sir Charles Mallet.

220

ISIS IDOL

Duchess of Sutherland, whom he knows affectionately as
Griss. It is the atmosphere of Sargent, of Faberge jewels,
but one is not sorry that to this author, who enjoyed with
such naive relish the great houses, the little political
crisis, the vulgarity was hidden.

Rich Jews at Court , in London and at Baden ;

Italian slang and golden chantberware;

Adultery and racing ; for the garden

Muslin and picture-hats and a blank stare .

He was a thoroughly Balliol best-seller: a double first,
a President of the Union, he took his popularity (£70,000
earned in the first ten years of writing) with admirable
suavity. He was never really a professional writer: it is
mainly the respectable underworld of literature that is
represented in the letters of which Sir Charles Mallet’s
book is more or less a precis : he turned his novels off in a
couple of months. Sometimes there were as many as three
manuscripts awaiting publication. He managed in his
delicate dealings with tragic or even blackguardly themes
to retain the Union air of not being wholly serious. You
could forgive his sentimentality because it struck so
artificial an attitude. He was a Balliol man: he wasn’t
easily impressed by his great contemporaries. It seemed
to him that Hardy was rather limited in his opinions, and
when Henry James died, he wrote: ‘a dear old fellow, a

great gentleman The critics call him a <c great

novelist”. I can’t think that.’ His own work was highly
praised by Sir James Barrie and Sir Gilbert Parker, but
he was not conceited. ‘Have you read my Pkroso ? I
wrote it in seven weeks laughing, and now I have to be
solemnly judged as though it were the effort of a life. It’s

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KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

really like explaining a kiss in the Divorce Court. . . .’ An
Isis Idol knows that next week he must inevitably be
dethroned, and he was quite prepared to see himself
superseded by another generation of popular writers who
would appeal to a taste which was already beginning to
reject the sentimental badinage of The Dolly Dialogues .

“I should describe you. Lady Mickleham,” I replied
discreetly, “as being a little lower than the angels.”

‘Dolly’s smile was almost a laugh as she asked:

“‘How much lower, please, Mr Carter?”

“‘Just by the depth of your dimples,” I said thought-
lessly.’

He always said that a run of about fifteen years would
be his limit, and he wrote towards the end of his time : ‘ If
I live to advanced age, I shall, I think, be dead while I
yet live in the body. I don’t complain. It is just . . . I’ve
had a pretty good run.’ It was the sporting, the thoroughly
Isis manner, and one is rather sorry that he did live long
enough to see his sales decline, that he didn’t die, like Mr
Rassendyll, still king in Rumania. His heart ought to
have given way in his own fragile, romantic, rather bogus
style at the highest leap — of his carefully recorded
statistics.

1935

222

THE LAST BUCHAN

More than a quarter of a century has passed since
Richard Hannay found the dead man in his flat and
started that long flight and pursuit— across the Yorkshire
and the Scottish moors, down Mayfair streets, along the
passages of Government buildi n gs, in and out of Cabinet
rooms and country houses, towards the cold Essex jetty
with the thirty-nine steps, that were to be a pattern for
adventure-writers ever since. John Buchan was the first
to realize the enormous dramatic value of adventure in
familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous
men, members of Parliament and members of the
Athenaeum, lawyers and barristers, business men and
minor peers : murder in "the atmosphere of breeding and
simplicity and stability’. Richard Hannay, Sir Edward
Leithen, Mr Blenkiron, Archie Royiance, and Lord
Lamancha; these were his adventurers, not Dr Nikola or
the Master of Ballantrae, and who will forget the first
thrill in 1 916 as the hunted Leithen — the future Solicitor-
General — ran ‘ like a thief in a London thoroughfare on a
June afternoon’ ?

‘Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilization.
An accident and a bogus ambulance — a false charge and a
bogus arrest — there were a dozen ways of spiriting one
out of this gay and bustling world.’

Now Leithen, who survived the perils of the Green
Park and the mews near Belgrave Square, has died in
what must seem to those who remember The Power House
a rather humdrum way, doing good to depressed and
starving Indians in Northern Canada, anticipating by
only a few months his creator’s death.*

* Sick Heart River, by John Buchan, 194a

223

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

What is remarkable about these adventure-stories is
the completeness of the world they describe. The back-
grounds to many of us may not be sympathetic, but they
are elaborately worked in: each character carries round
with him his school, his regiment, his religious beliefs,
often touched with Calvinism: memories of grouse-
shooting and deer-stalking, of sport at Eton, debates in
the House. For men who live so dangerously they are
oddly conventional — or perhaps, remembering men like
Scott and Oates, we can regard that, too, as a realistic
touch. They judge men by their war-record: even the
priest in Sick Heart River , fighting in the desolate northern
waste for the Indians’ salvation, is accepted by Leithen
because ‘he had served in a French battalion which had
been on the right of the Guards at Loos ’. Toe H and the
British Legion lurk in the background.

In the early books, fascinated by the new imaginative
form, the hair-breadth escapes in a real world, participat-
ing whole-heartedly in the struggle between a member of
the Athenaeum and the man who could hood his eyes like
a hawk, we didn’t notice the curious personal ideals, the
vast importance Buchan attributed to success, the
materialism , . . Sick Heart River, the last adventure of
the dying Leithen seeking — at Blenkiron’s request — the
missing business man, Francis GalHard, who had left his
wife and returned to his ancestral North, has all the old
admirable dry ease of style — it is the intellectual content
which repels us now, the Scotch admiration of success.
* Harold has a hard life. He’s head of the Fremont Bank-
ing Corporation and a St Sebastian for everyone to shoot
arrows at.’ Even a nation is judged by the same standard :
"They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the
world than they have.’ Individuals are of enormous

224

EDGAR WALLACE

I only saw Edgar Wallace once, but the moment has
stayed in my memory like a ‘conversation piece’. I was
twenty-five years old, I had published a first novel, and I
found myself a junior guest, very much *a stranger and
afraid’ at a great publisher’s do at the Savoy Hotel — a
banquet (no lesser word will serve) given jointly by the
English and American firms of Heinemann and Double-
day, who were then in uneasy partnership.

Dinner at the long tables, set at right angles, seemed a
kind of frozen geometry, but for a young man it was
worse when the geometrical figure was eventually broken
and I found myself with my coffee seated beside Arnold
Bennett who, when a waiter gave me a glass of ‘some-
thing’ (I was too frightened to refuse), remarked sternly,
‘A serious writer does not drink liqueurs.’ At that
moment (which doomed me, so far as liqueurs were con-
cerned, to a lifetime’s abstinence) I looked away from
him and saw Edgar Wallace at his first meeting with
Hugh Walpole.

I feel quite certain it was the first time these two giants
of the commercial novel had met : the giant of the circulat-
ing library and the giant of the cheap edition, the writer
who wanted, vainly, to be distinguished and recognized
and applauded as a literary figure, and the writer who
wanted, vainly too, to have all the money he needed, not
to bother about debts, to win the Derby every first
Wednesday in June, and to escape — to escape from the
knowledge of the world which perhaps the other would
have given half his success to have shared.

I remember Walpole’s patronizing gaze, his bald head
inclined under the chandeliers like that of a bishop speak-
ing with kindness to an unimportant member of his

226

EDGAR WALLACE

diocese. And the unimportant member? — he was so
oblivious of the bishop’s patronage that the other shrank
into insignificance before the heavy confident body, the
long challenging cigarette-holder, the sense that this man
cared not so much as a flybutton for the other’s world.
They had nothing in common, not even an ambition.
Even in those days I found myself on the side of Wallace.

From what environment Wallace escaped we learn
from Margaret Lane’s careful, sensitive and beautifully
organized biography* (has there ever before been so
literate a biography of a writer completely outside the
world of serious letters?) There is a curious likeness
between the early world of Wallace and the early world of
Chaplin: East London and South London were not so
far apart.

The mothers of both men were small figures in the
theatrical world who never made good. Chaplin was
abandoned for periods to the workhouse; Wallace was
abandoned altogether to a friendly family in Billingsgate.
Chaplin had brief knowledge of his father; Wallace, who
was illegitimate, none at all. Of the two children Wallace
was the more abandoned, though Chaplin had the crueller
experience, and the long distance between love and hate
separates the careers of these two men. Chaplin remained,
even in his success, rooted to Kennington; Wallace seems
to have been concerned only to forget, and there is one
repulsive moment in Miss Lane’s biography — otherwise
the record of a very generous man — when his old mother,
penniless and out of work, appeals to him for help and is
sent away with the harsh word to expect nothing from
him.

At about the same period Wallace wrote to his wife:

* Edgar Wallace, by Margaret Lane.

227

KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

‘I hate the British working man; I have no sympathy
with him ; whether he lives or dies, feeds or starves, is not
of the slightest interest to me.’ You can feel the flames of
the burning boats flushing his face. One attitude to the
hard childhood produced the immortal Chariot, the other
at its best The Four Just Men bent on their mission of
vengeance.

No one — the theologians and the psychologists agree —
is responsible for his own character: he can make only
small modifications for good or ill. Chaplin chose the
route of the artist and assimilated the hard childhood
which Wallace rejected. And Wallace? Instead of the
artist we have a phenomenon which might have been
invented by Balzac — the human book-factory. We cannot
help wondering, reading of the 150 novels he wrote in
twenty-seven years (twenty-eight of them written at £70
a time), whether he could not have found an easier road
than words to — what ? Not exactly financial success, for
at his death he left £140,000 of debts, but at least to that
state of life where there was money to bum.

Sometimes, looking in the windows of art-dealers
south of Piccadilly, I find myself wondering how it is that
a painter has stopped just here. I could no more paint
that sunset or that beetling cliff, that moorland with the
clump of sheep, than I could draw a recognizable human
face; but with that amount of enviable skill what has
made the painter stop ? Perhaps the answer is that if he
had ever possessed the capacity to enlarge his skill he
would never have begun on that sunset, that cliff, that
moorland.

The parallel is not exact, for Wallace at the very
beginning of his writing career had one great quality: he
could create a legend. I read The Four Just Mm for the

228

EDGAR WALLACE

first time when I was about ten years old, with enormous
excitement, and when I reread it the other day it was with
almost the same emotion. The plain style sometimes fails
into cliches, but not often; the melodrama grips in the
same way as The New Arabian Nights (Stevenson, too,
had a family history from which he tried to escape
through fantasy); Wallace tells an almost incredible
story with very precise realistic details. The Foreign
Secretary pursued by the four anarchists doesn’t dress up
as an old Jew, like the detective in The Flying Squad, nor
as a toothless Arab beggar, like the American diplomat in
The Man From Morocco , and there is no, thank God, love
interest at all. The story' moves at a deeper level of in-
vention than he ever tapped again.

Afterwards he invented so rapidly that sometimes he
forgot the opening of a paragraph before he reached its
end, as in this description of a rather unlikely Bond Street
flat (the italics are mine ) ; 4 The room in which he sat, with
its high ceiling fantastically carved into scrolls and
arabesques by the most cunning of Moorish workmen,
was wide and long and singular. The walls were of marble,
the floor an amazing mosaic covered with the silky rugs
of Ispahan. . . . With the exception of the desk, in-
congruously gaudy in the severe and beautiful setting,
there was little furniture.’

Grant the initial unlikelihood of four anarchists who
terrorize London, the police force, the Government, and
then every detail is authentic — so a legend is created.
When the hour of doom for the Foreign Secretary pro-
nounced by the Four Just Men approaches, he is locked
in his room and detectives fill the passages. The whole
city is in the hands of the police.

4 By order of the Commissioner, Westminster Bridge

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KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

was closed to all traffic, vehicular or passenger. The sec-
tion of the Embankment that runs between Westminster
and Hungerford Bridge was next swept by the police and
cleared of curious pedestrians; Northumberland Avenue
was barred, and before three o’clock there was no space
within five hundred yards of the official residence of Sir
Philip Ramon that was not held by a representative of the
law. Members of Parliament on their way to the House
were escorted by mounted men, and taking on a reflected
glory, were cheered by the crowd. All that afternoon a
hundred thousand people waited patiently, seeing
nothing, save, towering above the heads of a host of
constabulary, the spires and towers of the Mother of
Parliaments, or the blank faces of the buildings — in
Trafalgar Square, along the Mall as far as the police would
allow them, at the lower end of Victoria Street, eight
deep along the Albert Embankment, growing in volume
every hour. London waited, waited in patience, orderly,
content to stare steadfastly at nothing, deriving no satis-
faction for their weariness but a sense of being as near
as it was humanly possible to be to the scene of a tragedy.
A stranger arriving in London, bewildered by this gather-
ing, asked for the cause. A man standing on the out-
skirts of the Embankment throng pointed across the
river with the stem of his pipe.

‘“We’re waiting for a man to be murdered,” he said
simply, as one who describes a familiar function.”’

Surely at the start this man could write. If only he had
cared enough. But the illegitimate child left with the
Billingsgate family, the boy on the milk-run, had not
dreamt of being a writer. He had dreamt of a fortune, a
first-class suite in some great liner, of a racing stable; he

230

EDGAR WALLACE

had dreamt of escape, and the greatness of the debts
when Wallace came to die represented fairly enough the
greatness of the escape, for the bank manager in Tanner’s
Hill would surely not have allowed even Wallace’s
employer on the milk-run an overdraft exceeding ten
pounds.

1964

231

BEATRIX POTTER

‘It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is
soporific, 5 It is with some such precise informative sent-
ence that one might have expected the great Potter saga
to open, for the obvious characteristic of Beatrix Potter’s
style is a selective realism, which takes emotion for
granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle
detachment reminiscent of Mr E. M. Forster’s, Her
stories contain plenty of dramatic action, but it is de-
scribed from the outside by an acute and unromantic
observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective
gesture. As an example of Miss Potter’s empiricism, her
rigid adherence to what can be seen and heard, consider
the climax of her masterpiece The Roly-Poly Puddings
Tom Kitten’s capture by the rats in the attic:

‘ “Anna Maria,” said the old man rat (whose name was
Samuel Whiskers), “Anna Maria, make me a kitten
dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner.”

‘ “ It requires dough and a pat of butter, and a rolling
pin,” said Anna Maria, considering Tom Kitten with her
head on one side.

‘“No,” said Samuel Whiskers. “Make it properly,
Anna Maria, with breadcrumbs.”’

But in 1908, when The Roly-Poly Pudding was pub-
lished, Miss Potter was at the height of her power. She
was not a bom realist, and her first story was not only rom-
antic, it was historical. The Tailor of Gloucester opens:

‘In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted
lappets — when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced
waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta-^there lived a tailor in
Gloucester.’

232

BEATRIX POTTER

In the sharp details of this sentence, in the flowered
lappets, there is a hint of the future Potter, but her first
book is not only hampered by its period setting but by
the presence of a human character. Miss Potter is seldom
at her best with human beings (the only flaw in The Roly-
Poly Pudding is the introduction in the final pages of the
authoress in person), though with one human character
she succeeded triumphantly. I refer, of course, to Mr Mac-
Gregor, who made an elusive appearance in 1904 in The
Tale of Benjamin Bunny , ran his crabbed earthmould way
through Peter Rabbit , and met his final ignominious
defeat in The Flopsy Bunnies in 1909. But the tailor of
Gloucester cannot be compared with Mr MacGregor. He
is too ineffective and too virtuous, and the atmosphere of
the story — snow and Christmas bells and poverty — is
too Dickensian, Incidentally in Simpkin Miss Potter
drew her only unsympathetic portrait of a cat. The
ancestors of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca play
a humanitarian part. Their kind hearts are a little
oppressive.

In the same year Miss Potter published Squirrel Nut-
kin. It is an unsatisfactory book, less interesting than her
first, which was a good example of a bad genre. But in
1904, with the publication of Two Bad Mice> Miss Potter
opened the series of her great comedies. In this story of
Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca and their wanton havoc
of a doll’s house, the unmistakable Potter style first
appears.

It is an elusive style, difficult to analyse. It owes some-
thing to alliteration:

‘Hunca Munca stood up in her chair and chopped at
the ham with another lead knife.

233

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

‘“It’s as hard as the hams at the cheesemonger’s,” said
Hirnca Munca.’

Something too it owes to the short paragraphs, which
are fashioned with a delicate irony, not to complete a
movement, but mutely to criticize the action by arresting
it. The imperceptive pause allows the mind to take in the
picture: the mice are stilled in their enraged attitudes for
a moment, before the action sweeps forward.

‘Then there was no end to the rage and disappointment
of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca. They broke up the
pudding, the lobsters, the pears, and the oranges.

‘As the fish would not come off the plate, they put it
into the redhot crinkly paper fire in the kitchen; but it
would not bum either . 5

It is curious that Beatrix Potter’s method of paragraphing
has never been imitated.

The last quotation shows another element of her later
style, her love of a precise catalogue, her creation of
atmosphere with still-life. One remembers Mr Mac-
Gregor’s rubbish heap :

‘There were jam pots and paper bags and mountains
of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which
always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows
and an old boot or two . 9

The only indication in Two Bad Mice of a prentice hand
is the sparsity of dialogue; her characters had not yet
begun to utter those brief pregnant sentences, which have
slipped, like proverbs, into common speech. Nothing in

234

BEATRIX POTTER

the early book equals Mr Jackson's, 4 No teeth. No teeth.
No teeth.'

In 1904 too The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the second of the
great comedies, was published, closely followed by its
sequel, Benjamin Bunny . In Peter and his cousin Benja-
min Miss Potter created two epic personalities. The great
characters of fiction are often paired : Quixote and San-
cho, Pantagruel and Panurge, Pickwick and Weller,
Benjamin and Peter. Peter was a neurotic, Benjamin
worldly and imperturbable. Peter was warned by his
mother, ‘Don’t go into Mr MacGregor’s garden; your
father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs
MacGregor.’ But Peter went from stupidity rather than
for adventure. He escaped from Mr MacGregor by
leaving his clothes behind, and the sequel, the story of
how his clothes were recovered, introduces Benjamin,
whose coolness and practicality are a foil to the nerves
and clumsiness of his cousin. It was Benjamin who knew
the way to enter a garden: ‘It spoils people’s clothes to
squeeze under a gate ; the proper way to get in is to climb
down a pear tree.’ It was Peter who fell down head first.

From 1904 to 1908 were the vintage years in comedy;
to these years belong The Pie and the Patty Pan , The Tale
of Tom Kitten , The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle, and only
one failure, Mr Jeremy Fisher. Miss Potter had found her
right vein and her right scene. The novels were now set
in Cumberland; the farms, the village shops, the stone
walls, the green slope of Catbells became the background
of her pictures and her prose. She was peopling a country-
side. Her dialogue had become memorable because
aphoristic:

‘“I disapprove of tin articles in puddings and pies. It
235

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

is most undesirable — (especially when people swallow in
lumps).”’

She could draw a portrait in a sentence:

“‘My name is Mrs Tiggy Winkle; oh yes if you
please’m, Fm an excellent clear-starcher.”’

And with what beautiful economy she sketched the first
smiling villain of her gallery. Tom Kitten had dropped
his clothes off the garden wail as the Puddle-Duck family
passed:

“‘Cornel Mr Drake Puddle-Duck,” said Moppet,
“Come and help us to dress him! Come and button up
Torn!”

‘Mr Drake Puddle-Duck advanced in a slow sideways
manner, and picked up the various articles.

‘But he put them on himself. They fitted him even
worse than Tom Kitten.

“‘It’s a very fine morning,” said Mr Drake Puddle-
Duck/

Looking backward over the thirty years of Miss Potter’s
literary career, we see that the creation of Mr Puddle-
Duck marked the beginning of a new period. At some
time between 1907 and 1909 Miss Potter must have
passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the
character of her genius. It would be impertinent to
inquire into the nature of the ordeal. Her case is curiously
similar to that of Henry James. Something happened
which shook their faith in appearance. From The Portrait
of a Lady onwards, innocence deceived, the treachery of

236

BEATRIX POTTER

friends, became the theme of James’s greatest stories.
Mme Merle, Kate Croy, Mme de Vionnet, Charlotte
Stant, these tortuous treacherous women are paralleled
through the dark period of Miss Potter’s art. ‘A man can
smile and smile and be a villain,’ that, a little altered, was
her recurrent message, expressed by her gallery of
scoundrels: Mr Drake Puddle-Duck, the first and sligh-
test, Mr Jackson, the least harmful with his passion for
honey and his reiterated, ‘No teeth. No teeth. No teeth’,
Samuel Whiskers, gross and brutal, and the ‘gentleman
with sandy whiskers’ who may be identified with Mr
Tod. With the publication of Mr Tod in 1912, Miss
Potter’s pessimism reached its climax. But for the nature
of her audience Mr Tod would certainly have ended
tragically. In Jemima Puddle-Duck the gentleman with
sandy whiskers had at least a debonair impudence when
he addressed his victim:

‘“Before you commence your tedious sitting, I intend
to give you a treat. Let us have a dinner party all to our-
selves!

* “ May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm
garden to make a savoury omelette? Sage and thyme,
and mint and two onions, and some parsley. I will pro-
vide lard for the stuff — lard for the omelette,” said the
hospitable gentleman with sandy whiskers.’

But no charm softens the brutality of Mr Tod and his
enemy, the repulsive Tommy Brock. In her comedies
Miss Potter had gracefully eliminated the emotions of low
and death; it is the measure of her genius that when, in
The Tale of Mr Tod, they broke the barrier, the form of
her book, her ironic style, remained unshattered. When

237

KOVELS AND NOVELISTS

she could not keep death out she stretched her technique
to include it. Benjamin and Peter had grown up and
married, and Benjamin’s babies were stolen by Brock;
the immortal pair, one still neurotic, the other knowing
and imperturbable, set off to the rescue, but the rescue,
conducted in darkness, from a house, ‘ something between
a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pig-sty % compares
grimly with an earlier rescue from Mr MacGregor’s
sunny vegetable garden:

‘The sun had set; an owl began to hoot in the wood.
There were many unpleasant things lying about, that
had much better have been buried ; rabbit bones and skulls
and chicken’s legs and other horrors. It was a shocking
place and very dark.’

But Mr Tod y for all the horror of its atmosphere, is in-
dispensable. There are few fights in literature which can
compare in excitement with the duel between Mr Tod
and Tommy Brock (it was echoed by H. G. Wells in Mr
Polly):

‘Everything was upset except the kitchen table.

‘And everything was broken, except the mantelpiece
and the kitchen fender. The crockery was smashed to
atoms.

‘The chairs were broken, and the window, and the
clock fell with a crash, and there were handfuls of Mr
Tod’s sandy whiskers.

‘The vases fell off the mantelpiece, the canisters fell off
the shelf ; the kettle fell off the hob. Tommy Brock put his
foot in a jar of raspberry jam.’

Mr Tod marked the distance which Miss Potter had

238

BEATRIX POTTER

travelled since the ingenuous romanticism of The Tailor
of Gloucester . The next year with The Tale of Pigling
Bland , the period of the great near-tragedies came to an
end. There was something of the same squalor, and the
villain, Mr Thomas Piperson, was not less terrible than Mr
Tod, but the book ended on a lyrical note, as Pigling
Bland escaped with Pig-Wig:

‘They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill,
and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom,
between pebble-beds and rushes. They came to the river,
they came to the bridge — they crossed it hand in hand — ’

It was the nearest Miss Potter had approached to a con-
ventional love story. The last sentence seemed a promise
that the cloud had lifted, that there was to be a return to
the style of the earlier comedies. But Pigling Bland was
published in 1913. Through the years of war the author
was silent, and for many years after it was over, only a few
books of rhyme appeared. These showed that Miss Potter
had lost none of her skill as an artist, but left the great
question of whither her genius was tending unanswered.
Then, after seventeen years, at the end of 1930, Little Pig
Robinson was published.

The scene was no longer Cumberland but Devonshire
and the sea. The story, more than twice as long as Mr Tod,
was diffuse and undramatic. The smooth smiling villain
had disappeared and taken with him the pungent dialogue,
the sharp detail, the light of common day. Miss Potter
had not returned to the great comedies. She had gone on
beyond the great near-tragedies to her Tempest . No
tortured Lear nor strutting Antony could live on Pros-
perous island, among the sounds and sweet airs and cloud-

239

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

capt towers. Miss Potter too had reached her island, the
escape from tragedy, the final surrender of imagination
to safe serene fancy:

"A stream of boiling water flowed down the silvery
strand. The shore was covered with oysters. Add-drops
and sweets grew upon the trees. Yams, which are a sort
of sweet potato, abounded ready cooked. The breadfruit
tree grew iced cakes and muffins ready baked/

It was all very satisfying for a pig Robinson, but in that
rarefied air no bawdy Tommy Brock could creep to
burrow, no Benjamin pursue his feud between the vege-
table-frames, no Puddle-Duck could search in wide-eyed
innocence for a ‘convenient dry nesting-place 5 .

Note. On the publication of this essay I received a somewhat acid
letter from Miss Potter correcting certain details. Little Pig
R6binscm> although the last published of her books, was in fact the
first written. She denied that there had been any emotional disturb-
ance at the time she was writing Mr Tod : she was suffering however
from the after-effects of flu. In conclusion she deprecated sharply
‘the Freudian school’ of criticism.

1933

240

HARKAWAY’S OXFORD

My father used to have hanging on his bathroom wall a
photographic group of young men in evening dress with
bright blue waistcoats. They were, I think, the officials of
an Oxford undergraduate wining club, but with their
side-whiskers and heavy moustaches they had more the
appearance of Liberal Ministers. Earnest and well-
informed, they hardly seemed to be members of the same
world as Jack Harkaway, whose adventures at Oxford
were published in twopenny numbers — or bound to-
gether in two volumes at 6d. apiece — by the ‘Boys of
England’ office some time in the early eighties. They
seemed, sitting there on dining-room chairs, squarely
facing the camera, to hark back more naturally to that
much earlier Oxford described by Newman, when
Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian was a book to
make the blood boil — ‘One of our common friends told
me, that, after reading it, he could not keep still, but went
on walking up and down his room. 5 But unless we are to
disbelieve the literary evidence of Jack Harkaway at
Oxford , the earnest moustache is deceptive: it is the
bright blue waistcoat which is the operative image, and I
like to imagine that my father’s photograph contains the
whole galaxy — Tom Carden, Sir Sydney Dawson, Fabian
Hall, Harvey, and the Duke of Woodstock — of what must
have been known universally as a Harkaway year, for in
1 88 — Harkaway succeeded in the then unprecedented
feat of winning his Blue for rowing, cricket, and football
and ending the academic year with a double-first. All this
too in spite of the many attempts upon his life and honour
engineered by Davis of Singapore whom he had baffled
while still a schoolboy in the East. Their reunion at Sir

OE.G.G.

241

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

Sydney Dawson’s ‘wine’ is an impressive scene — im-
pressive too in its setting:

4 A variety of wines were upon the table with all sorts of
biscuits and preserved fruits. Olives, however, seemed to
be the most popular. A box of cigars, which cost four
guineas, invited the attention of smokers. . . . Jack walked
over to a tall, effeminate looking young man, with a pale
complexion, and having his hair parted in the middle.

4 “How do, Kemp ?” he said.

4 “Ah, how do ?” replied Kemp, with a peculiar smile.
“Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Mr Frank
Davis of Singapore.”

4 Jack stared in amazement. Before him was his sworn
and determined enemy. Davis had told him that he was
going to England to complete his education at a University.
He had added that wherever Jack was, he would still hate
him, and seek for his revenge. . . . That it was Davis of
Singapore he had no doubt. He had lost one ear.

‘Making a cold and distant bow, Davis replied — “Mr
Harkaway and I have met before.”

‘“Really?” exclaimed Kemp. “I’m glad of that. It’s
such a nuisance helping fellows to talk. Davis is not in
our college. He’s a Merton man.”’

It was unwise of Harkaway towards the end of this
same ‘wine’ to transfix Kemp’s hand to the table with a
fork when he detected him cheating at cards. The inci-
dent led directly to the corruption of Sir Sydney with
drink so that he could not ride in the steeplechase against
the Duke of Woodstock’s horse, Kemp up; to Jack’s
imprisonment for debt on the eve of the Boat Race (but
the Jew’s beautiful daughter Hilda, whom he had saved

242

harkaway’s oxford

from drowning in the Cher, foiled that plot); to the kid-
napping of Hilda and Emily, Jack’s betrothed, by Davis
and the Duke of Woodstock (‘ “ Let’s have — aw — one kiss
before we part,” said the Duke, with an amorous glance
in Hilda’s direction. “Dash my — aw — buttons, but one
kiss.”’); to the foul attempt on Jack’s life in a railway
train, and to Kemp setting Emily alight — a rather bizarre
episode;

‘He approached Emily, who was standing with her
back to him in her muslin ball dress, looking very gauzy
and fairylike.

‘Drawing a wax match from his pocket, he struck it
gently, and held it under her skirt lighting the inflam-
mable material in three places.

‘Then he retired with the same snakelike, gliding
manner.’

The story is, of course a sensational one (it isn’t often
that an undergraduate arrives in Oxford with so teeming
a past, and with a private tutor — Mr Mole — who had
been secretly married to a black woman in the east), but
its chief value, I think, lies in its incidentals: the still-life
of an Oxford breakfast — ‘At ten o’clock a very decent
breakfast stood on the table, consisting of cold game, hot
fish, Strasbourg patties, honey in the comb, tea and coffee,
with other trifles’; in the delightful turns of phrase:

“‘Do you dine in Hall ?”

“‘No, we have ordered our mutton at the Mitre”’,
and the local manners:

“‘What shall we do?”

243

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

4 “Go and screw Scraper up,” said an undergraduate
in his second year.

‘“Splendid!” replied Sir Sydney Dawson. “Get a
hammer and gimlet and some screws.”

‘Air Scraper was an unpopular tutor, and they did not
care for consequences. . . . The Dean heard the noise,
and summoning two tutors, went with the porter carrying
a lantern to the scene of the disturbance . 5

‘“What is the matter, Mr Scraper?” said the Dean.

‘“Iam screwed up, sir,” said Mr Scraper . 5

One notices in this wild scene outside Mr Scraper’s
window an odd change in the character of one college:
‘A friend of Daw T son’s who was a Brasenose man sank on
his knees overcome by wine, and began to recite a
portion of Demosthenes’ oration on the crown . 5

But above all I value the book for its picture of Sir
Sydney Dawson, imprudent, good-hearted, arrogant, the
apotheosis of the wining club. With his aristocratic brutal-
ity and his spendthrift kindliness, he must have been
every inch a blue waistcoat. Take, for example, the inci-
dent of the explosive cigars in Sir Sydney’s room: ‘“I
keep them for my tradesmen. The fellows come here
worrying for orders and I give them a cigar, which soon
starts them,” replied the baronet laughing 5 , but when he
had blown up Mr Mole, scorched his face, and tumbled
him in a bowl of goldfish, he feels for the tutor — c By
Jove, this is not right. I must write a letter of apology . 5 In
the theatre ‘as if to show his contempt for Oxford society.
Sir Sydney Dawson took out his handsome cigar-case,
and lighted up, though he knew it was against the rules 5 ,
but his treatment of Franklin who does lines for com-
moners in return for a consideration (‘“lam one of the

244

harkaway’s oxford

servitors of the college. Perhaps you do not know what
that is,” he added with a sad smile ’} shows he has a kind
heart. “‘I wonder what a poor man at Oxford is like. I
should like to see him. Perhaps an hour or two with a poor
man would do me good, always supposing he’s a gentle-
man. I can’t stand a cad.”’

It may be argued, of course, that, because the author,
Edw r in J. Brett, had never been to Oxford, this whole
setting is imaginary, an Oxford of the heart, but I do not
see why the well-known argument in favour of immortality
should not apply here too — that ‘an instinct does not
exist unless there is a possibility of its being satisfied’,
and certainly the instinct exists in this confused un-
certain age — a will to return to Sir Sydney’s reckless self-
assurance and his breakfasts, to ‘mutton at the Mitre 5 , a
dogcart ‘spanking along the Iffley Road’, to screwing
Scraper up.

1938

245

PART III

Some Characters

[I]

POETRY FROM LIMBO

Miss Guiney began this magnificently thorough an-
thology in 1913.* Her work was nearly finished when she
died in 1920, and it was completed by her friend, Mr
Edward O’Brien, who brought up to date the biographi-
cal and bibliographical notes. Miss Guiney in her intro-
duction makes the modest claim that the value of the
collection is as much historical as literary; the scholar
must decide on that, but the general reader will be
astounded by its wealth of lirde-known poetry.

The term recusant has been given the widest possible
meaning — to include any Catholic who suffered from the
civil power for his faith, but the contributions have been
wisely confined to those which have some bearing on
Catholic doctrine or ideals. Many of the poets, of course,
are familiar: More himself, Constable, Lodge, Southwell,
Surrey; some have been known only to specialists, and a
few make their appearance for the first time in print. It
is by no means a purely heroic company, and far from a
saintly one — here is the turncoat Alabaster and cowardly,
light-headed Copley, who, when he was a student in
Rome — so Father Parsons reported — went up to the
pulpit to preach with a rose in his mouth. It is a pleasant
irony that this Bye Plot conspirator, who made a con-
fession implicating his friends, should have been the
author of the fine stoic lines :

Give me the man that with undaunted spirit
Dares give occasion of a Tragedie.

Here, too, are the merely unattractive or the grotesque —
Myles Hogarde, of Pudding Lane, with his eye for other

* Recusant Poets , by Louise Imogen Guiney. With a selection
from their work: Sir Thomas More to Ben Jonson.

249

SOME CHARACTERS

men’s errors, and Pickering, the too-careful Dominican
of the Pilgrimage of Grace, who tried to rewrite the
popular songs of that wild and hopeful year in a seemly
and pedantic way:

It is zurytyn in the machabies — Loke well the storie —
Accingemini potentes que estote filii .

It is interesting to watch how, among these unprofes-
sional poets, the heroic and the uncertain, the rash and
the too politic, the main themes change. At first the
theme is social — the decay of charity and hospitality: the
greed for wealth. Men who were born in the pre-capital-
ist age describe with indignation the new capitalist spirit
— which they still hope to see pass :

Stick bribyng for the purse , which ever gapes for more ,
Such hordyng up of worldly wealth , such keeping much in
store . . . .

Such falshed undercraft , and such unstedfast wayes ,

Was never sene within men's hartes, as is found nowaday es.

This is the theme, too, of the magnificent and anonymous
marching song of the Pilgrims of Grace : it is astonishing-
ly explicit in a poem by William Forrest, who inventories
in minute detail the old just wages for a winter or a sum-
mer day, and such post-Reformation abuses as paying a
woman less than a man for the same work. As time goes
on, this theme vanishes : people can no longer remember
the old social system ; if the subject re-emerges, as in one
of Lodge’s poems, it is in the form of nostalgia for some-
thing which will never return:

Then, then did flourish that renowned time ,

When earth and ashes thrusted not to clime .

250

POETRY FROM LIMBO

This was the swan-song of the social conscience among
Roman Catholic poets.

The subject of martyrdom next began to take the
principal place as the Douai victims accumulated: the
peril of informers, the activities of TopcMe, the warden
knocking at the cell-door; and the anonymous author of
Calvary Mount recounts the whole routine of martyrdom,
from the stretching of the joints to the last horrible ride.
Again we notice the concreteness of the expression, which
became yet barer with the years, until in a poem, not
printed here as it dates from 1646, we read:

But quick and live they cut him dozen
And butcher him full soon:

Behead , tear and dismember straight ,

And laugh when all is done .

A practised poet, of course, dealt very differently and
most exquisitely with the same material :

Rue not my death rejoyce at my repose
It was no death to mee but to my woe
The bud was opened to let out the rose
The cheynes unloosed to let the captive goe;

but we can be glad that those others — who were only
poets by accident — stuck to the bare fact.

It is not till the second half of this period that the third
subject emerges — the doctrinal. The social changes had
been obvious from the start and martyrdoms did not take
place in a comer : it needed time for men to feel the weight
of the sacramental loss. It was not really oppressive until
they had reached that state described by Constable in a

251

SOME CHARACTERS

sonnet outside the scheme of this book: ‘Hope, like the
hyena coming to be old . 9 An anonymous poet writes on
‘the new learning 5 ; William Blundell of Crosby carefully
notes the changes one by one and concludes in a tone
which reminds us of his cavalier descendant:

The time is now as all men see

new faiths have kild ould honestie.

And Constable in a sonnet describes the Blessed Sacra-
ment with the exactness of a theologian — again we note
the admirable, almost prosaic precision of these poets,
which seems more alive to us today than the rich imagery
of Spenser.

Only occasionally do I feel inclined to quarrel with the
editor — for the suggestion that the lovely singable lament
over Walsingham may have been written by Southwell
(surely it lacks altogether the heavy intellectual ground-
swell of his poetry ?) and for the inclusion of so much of
Surrey’s beautiful and inapposite verse. This is to draw
the net too wide — the mainspring of his poetry was
mainly aristocratic. It wasn’t the faith he missed in
prison so much as the ‘palme play 9 at Windsor, the cry
of hounds, ‘the wanton talk, the divers change of
play 9 , the favour of a Court. He seems more out of place
in the company of the martyrs than the coward Copley
or poor uncertain Alabaster: dying a patrician death on
Tower Hill, unacquainted with that dingy cell in New-
gate which was known to more base-born recusants as
limbo.

1939

252

AN UNHEROIC DRAMATIST

Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is one of the great bores
of literature, and it can hardly have been a labour of love
for Mr Clark to edit for the first time eight ponderous
heroic plays, hardly lightened by two attempts at comedy.
Yet all admirers of the period will be grateful: there is a
peculiar satisfaction in seeing one more gap in Restora-
tion scholarship filled with such immense efficiency: no
crack between the bricks. Not for them the rather hollow
excuse that Orrery was the pioneer of heroic drama in
England. They will read with gorged satisfaction that one
of these plays. The Tragedy ofZoroastes , has never before
been printed and that Orrery’s first play (Mr Clark leaves
us in no doubt of this), The Generali , has been previously
printed only in a private edition of eighty copies. Another
great booming bogus piece. The Tragedy of King Saul , is
added to the Orrery canon for the first time. All this, with
the really magnificent notes on Restoration stage-craft, is
a not unworthy harvest of eight years’ labour.*

Roger Boyle (let us extend praise as far as it will go)
was not always a worse poet than was Lee in his earliest
plays : there are a few charming lines to be unearthed in
The Generali (Mr Clark curiously prefers the maturer,
emptier Henry the Fifth):

Death which mankind in such high awe does keep
Gan only hold us in eternal sleepy
And if a life after this life remains.

Sure to our loves belong those happier plains ,

There in blest fields Vtt pass the endless hours.

And him I crown with love , PU crown with flowers.

* The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle , Earl of Orrery , edited by
William Smith Clark.

253

SOME CHARACTERS

It is very minor poetry, of course, but it does shine out
among the heroic sentiments. Otherwise the chief
pleasure in this his best play is in the period note. Sur-
feited with action on the screen, one finds a curious
charm in the passivity and irrelevance of a scene which
opens : c Filadin : Lett us then of our mistresses discourse. 5

Roger Boyle was not the man for heroic drama. Dryden
with his inalterable belief in authority which took him
logically by way of Cromwell to the Catholic Church,
yes: Lee with the turbulent generous mind that brought
him to Bedlam, yes : but we are aware of too great a gap
between the man and his poetry when we get as low as
Settle, and Boyle presents us with the same incongruity.
Mr Clark has written his life in greater detail, though with
infinitely less charm, than Eustace Budgell (to whose
eighteenth-century biography he might surely have paid
the tribute of a footnote), and the portrait he rather stiffly
draws is that of a very polite man, a man who lived on the
dubious borderline between patronage and treachery. He
played no part in the Civil War in England, being fortu-
nate enough to be occupied in Ireland against the Catho-
lic rebels: on the King’s death he began to correspond
with Charles II, but Cromwell got possession of the
letters and in a remarkable scene, which Mr Clark should
have given in detail, presented him with the choice
between the Tower and a command in Ireland. Boyle, of
course, took the command, and on Cromwell’s death
began again his politic moves. But he was forestalled by
Monck: the patriot always moves faster than the politic.
Nevertheless he became a friend of the King, wrote plays
at the Royal command and, when he had the gout, served
in Ireland, intrigued against Ormonde, and died un-
lamented by Burnet at the age of fifty-nine.

254

AN UNHEROIC DRAMATIST

A man quite remarkably free from the impediments of
friendship, how can he do else but write a little hollowly
on that favourite heroic theme ?

But that I may be better understood
Knowe friendshipp is a greater lye than blood .

A sister is a name must not contend

With the more high and sacred name of friend .

Burnet, if not his chaplain Morrice, saw through his
pretence to religion, and there is one moment in The
Generali when a somewhat similar dramatic situation
allows a direct comparison with Dryden. It will be
remembered how Don Sebastiano dealt with the theme
of suicide:

Brutus and Cato might discharge their SouIs y
And give them furious for another world :

But we like Gentries are oblig'd to stand
In starless nights , and wait th' appointed hour .

But hear the politic accents of Burnet’s 4 very fickle and
false man’ in the character of Altemara:

When I am forc'd of two Uls one to choose ,

'Tis virtue then the greatest to refuse .

When in this straight I by the Gods am plac'd ,

I'll rather cease to Live them live unchaste .

Without religion and without friendship. Orrery tried to
write heroic dramas : the succession of plays, one imitated
from the other, soon palled, even on Pepys, and he tried

255

SOME CHARACTERS

his hand at comedy. Guzman is quite unreadable buffoon-
ery, but of Air Anthony it is just possible to say that it is
as good as the worst of D’Urfey. He was, if that is in his
favour, a clean writer, but then he seems to have had as
little passion as he had religion.

1937

256

DR OATES OF SALAMANCA

Miss Lane is to be congratulated on her courage in
undertaking so grim and unrelieved a work as a biography
of Titus Oates (a work that has deterred biographers for
nearly two hundred and fifty years) as well as on her skill
and scholarship. No biographer can ever have been able
to claim with more likelihood of truth that his work is
definitive.*

It is interesting sometimes to speculate on how our
ideas of a period would be modified if one character or
one episode were removed. A man like Titus Oates
occurs like a slip of the tongue, disclosing the uncon-
scious forces, the night-side of an age we might otherwise
have thought of in terms of Dryden discussing the art of
dramatic poesy, while his Thames boatmen rested on
their oars and the thunder of an indeterminate sea battle
came up from the Medway no louder than the noise of
swallows in a chimney. The reach of human nature in his
day, if Oates had not enlightened us, would not have
extended much lower than the amiable vices of the Court :
Rochester acting Dr Bendo, Sedley prancing naked on
the Epsom balcony, sin fluttering with the unimportance
of a fan through the delicate cadences of Etherege’s prose,
that played so charmingly with the same counters, the
Park, the Mulberry Gardens, the game of ombre, and as
night falls °tis now but high Mall, Madam, the most
entertaining time of all the evening \ And reaching the
other way, would our hand have extended, without the
martyrs of the Plot, much further than the piety of
Bunyan ? Until Oates came on the scene, it seemed hard-
ly a period for courage any more than for evil. The

* Titus Oates , by Jane Lane.

17 — CJB.G.G. 257

SOME CHARACTERS

career of Oates ploughed up the age and exposed the
awful unchanging potentialities of human nature.

If we wished to present a portrait of evil in human
terms it would be hard to find a more absolute example
than the Salamanca doctor. At no point in his career does
he seem to have been touched by any form of idealism.
At no point is it possible to say that he was led on by a
false fanaticism, or that he did wrong with any idea that
right might come. His career was one of unexampled
squalor, from his snotty-nosed childhood. ‘I thought
that he would have been a natural,’ his mother is said to
have reported, c for his Nose always run and he slabbered
at the mouth, and his Father could not endure him; and
when he came home at night the Boy would use to be in
the Chimney comer, and my Husband would cry take
away this snotty Fool, and jumble him about, which
made me often weep, because you know he was my child.’
Yet the early years are the lighter side of Oates’s life. So
long as he was unsuccessful w r e can be entertained by the
grotesqueness of his career: expelled from school, sent
down from Cambridge, turned out of his living, wanted
for his first perjury (he had coveted a schoolmaster’s post
at Hastings and therefore brought against the poor man
an accusation of committing an unnatural offence in the
church porch), a chaplain in the Navy and expelled again.
The shadows fall with his success — his ‘conversion’ to
Catholicism, his stay at St Omer’s College, and last the
Plot itself.

Miss Lane is careful to give only such details of the
Plot and the trials as come directly within the scope of
her subject. She does not concern herself, for example, in
any detail with the unsolved murder of Sir Edmund
Berry Godfrey, a wise austerity perhaps in a book so long

258

DR OATES OF SALAMANCA

and necessarily so unrelieved in its horror. Her judge-
ment of Charles II is admirably balanced and her con-
demnation brief and pointed. Of Oates’s final trial she
writes; ‘King James left Oates to the Law, which was
precisely what King Charles had done in the case of
Oates’s victims; but whereas Charles knew those victims
to be innocent, James was convinced that Oates was
guilty.’ We prefer this final sentence on the King to the
sentimental championship of Mr Arthur Bryant : ‘Alone,
vilified, driven on every side, Charles remained calm and
patient, etc.’ The King, it is true, was fighting for the
survival of the House of Stuart, but those innocent men,
cut down from the gailows while still alive to be drawn
and quartered, may well have wondered whether the
price the King paid was not too vicarious. ‘ Let the blood
lie on them that condemned them,’ Charles is reported
to have said, ‘ for God knows I sign with tears in my eyes’,
but even if an appeal is made to God, responsibility can-
not be so easily shifted and tears are more becoming after
a crime than at the moment of commission. Perhaps this
was the chief horror in the career of Oates, the corruption
he exercised through fear. If he had had one redeeming
quality, physical or mental, if he had charmed as some
dictators have done with bonhomie or inspired confidence
with false oratory, the corruption would have seemed less
extreme, but fear was his only weapon, and Charles II
joins the poor ex-schoolmaster William Smith as one of
those on whose cowardice Oates found he could rdy.

1949

259

ANTHONY A WOOD

When Anthony a Wood, the Oxford antiquarian, died
in 1695 and left his books, manuscripts and pamphlets to
the Ashmolean Museum, a colleague wrote : ‘This bene-
faction will not perhaps be so much valued by the Uni-
versity as it ought to be because it comes from Anthony
Wood.’ He was the best-hated man in the University; he
was malicious, he was dangerous because he had a power
over words; he noted everything. They burnt his great
book, Athenae Oxoniensis , and he recorded the event in
his diary with a venomous certainty of posterity’s judge-
ment. In five volumes, published forty years ago by Dr
Andrew Clark, the Oxford of his day stands pricked in
acid.

There is Mr Smith, of University College, whose
lecture in the Theatre was attended by two thousand
people. ‘Mr Smith was very baudy among the women:
he had a grand auditory, while some lecturers had none
— so you may see what governs the world 5 ; he hears
certain ‘bachelors 5 and masters (he never fails to give
names) ‘uttering fluently romantick nonsense, unintel-
ligible gibberish, flourishing lyes and nonsense 5 ; he dines
with his brother Kit — ‘cold meat, cold entertainment,
cold reception, cold clownish woman 5 : he writes of poor
John Aubrey, and Aubrey’s most passionate defenders
cannot deny the truth in the caricature: ‘a shiftless
person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little
better than erased 5 ; the Court comes and goes again:
‘rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, carelesse 5 .
Mr Peter Allan, of Christ Church, ‘with his pupill Lord
Shandoes and Mr Jeanson (who the Sunday before
preached at St Giles) with Sir Willoughby D 5 ews 5 are
eternalized in his diary in the act of entering a bawdy

260

ANTHONY A WOOD

house in Mew Inn Lane. The great Doctor Fell does not
escape the pen which notes also ‘a calf with a face like a
man 5 exhibited at the ‘ Golden Lion 5 , the rotting bones
on a gibbet on Shotover, a brass here, a natural phenom-
enon there.

The Oxford scholars tried to turn the tables. They pre-
tended he had a bastard at Headington, they made him
angry by accusing him of keeping drunken company; in
the days of the Popish Plot they spread the rumour that
he was a papist: ‘a man that is studious and reserved is
popishly affected 5 ; but not one of them left a record to
supersede his. William Prideaux’s letters to John Ellis
confirm Wood’s picture of seventeenth-century Oxford;
there is nothing quainter in Wood than Prideaux’s de-
scription of Doctor Fell making a surprise visit to the
Clarendon Press and finding it secretly employed in
printing an edition of Aretine for 'the gentlemen of All
Souls’; of Bodley’s Librarian nearly beaten to death by
his wife, £ an old whore 5 ; of the Vice-Chancellor’s under-
graduates 'bubbeing 5 at the 'Split Crow 5 with his
approval.

Anthony Wood is not concerned only with local history.
The Oxford of the Great Western Railway is more remote
from political life than the Oxford which could just be
reached in a day by a fast coach from London. It was the
birth-place of several of Charles’s bastards, the scene of
the most dramatic Parliamentary dissolution of his reign;
and James II, too, presented himself as closely as Doctor
Fell to Wood’s careful, malicious eyes: 'Afterwards the
King, with a scarlet coat on, his blew ribbon and Georg,
and a star on his left papp, with an old French course hat
on edged with a little seem of lace (all not worth a groat
as some of the people shouted }. 5 But a certain distance

261

SOME CHARACTERS

from London had its advantages, and during the terror
of the Popish Plot Wood’s study of character and
familiarity with slander kept him from running with the
crowd. In 1679 he confided to his diary — he would not
have been rash enough to have told it abroad — a story of
Oates and Bedlow which ended with the w r ords, 4 So the
King’s worthy evidence sneaked away.’

1932

262

SOME CHARACTERS

quiet and innocence. It meant study (he was the trans-
lator of The French Gardener in his youth, of The Com-
plete Gardener in his age). It meant labour:

5 The hithermost Grove I planted about 1656; the
other beyond it, 1660; the lower Grove 1662; the holly
hedge even with the Mount hedge below 1670 . 1 planted
every hedge and tree not only in the gardens, groves, &c.,
but about all the fields and house since 1653, except those
large, old and hollow elms in the stable court and next
the sewer, for it was before, all one pasture field to the
very garden of the house, which was but small. 5

It meant the arid grief of work wasted when Admiral
Benbow, to whom Evelyn had let Sayes Court, relet it to
Peter the Great, who spoilt the bowling green, demol-
ished fruit trees, and had himself driven daily in a wheel-
barrow through the great holly hedge that Evelyn loved.
It seems to have been the image by which he could
visualize immortality: at his birthplace, at Wotton, to
which he returned to live in his old age, he began to
labour again: ‘I am planting an evergreen grove here to
an old house ready to drop. 5 It was certainly his most
enduring passion. "The late elegant and accomplished
Sir W. Temple, tho 5 he laid not his whole body in this
garden, deposited the better part of it (the heart) there;
and if my executors will gratify me in what I have desired,
I wish my corpse may be interred as I have bespoke
them. 5 But this man of few wants seldom had them
gratified, and he was buried within the church. Lord
Ponsonby speaks of ‘the darkness, the locked door, and
the iron railings 5 .

Evelyn had not Pepys’s power of transmitting himself
264

JOHN EVELYN

to posterity. He is himself the least character in his own
diary; and his knowledge of other men was no more
penetrating than his knowledge of himself. He worked
hard on a multiplicity of committees, but these were to
him as much an escape from real life as the garden was to
Marvell. One imagines him selfless, innocent, taken
advantage of. He had no instinctive knowledge of psy-
chology; he believed implicitly in the high moral worth
of Lady Sunderland, because she kept her garden in good
order; he was puzzled by her husband’s inconsistencies,
rather than distressed by his treacheries. Though he was
not deceived in the goodness of Margaret Godolphin, his
life of her show r s no perception of character. She is Virtue
as the Court is Sin, she is Alabaster as it is Clay.

No man, indeed, could be less judged by his friend-
ships, but in that strange company, which included
Jeremy Taylor, as well as Lady Sunderland, I wish that
Lord Ponsonby had found room for William Oughtred,
the mathematician, who, according to Aubrey, came very
near to discovering the philosopher’s stone, and who died
with joy at the Restoration. For Evelyn, who had success-
fully avoided the slaughterings of civil war, came near to
killing his friend, when a grotto in the gardens he had
designed at Albury collapsed.

His lack of psychological penetration prevented Evelyn
from being a good diarist. His merits as a writer showed
themselves when he wrote as a specialist, and he was a
specialist not only on gardens, but on salads, on coins, on
sculpture, on Spinoza, on navigation. I confess that I
have to take Lord Ponsonby’s word for the value of his
great work, Sylva. But the same meticulous detail
("Whenever you sow, if you prevent not the little field
mouse, he will be sure to have the better share’), can be

265

SOME CHARACTERS

seen in Fumifugiwn with its plan for a green belt round
London planted with sweet smelling flowers and herbs.
His style is peppered with pedantries, but there is a kind
of Baconian beauty in the accumulation of detail, and a
touch all Evelyn’s own in the sudden lyrical quickening,
the sudden widening of his horizon, as a memory of his
early travels comes back on him.

c I propose, . . . That these Palisads be elegantly planted,
diligently kept and supply’d with such Shrubs , as yield
the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers , and are aptest
to tinge the Aer upon every gentle emission at a great
distance: Such as are (for instance amongst many others)
the Sweet-briery all the Periclymenas and Woodbinds ; the
Common white and yellow Jessamine, both the Syringas or
Pipe trees; the Guelder-rose , the Musk and all other Roses;
Genista Hispanica : To these may be added the Rubus
odoratus, Bayes , Juniper , Lignum-vitae , Lavender: but
above all, Rosemary , the Flowers whereof are credibly
reported to give their scent above thirty Leagues off at
Sea, upon the coasts of Spain: and at some distance
towards the Meadow side, Vines , yea. Hops

The seventeenth century has been lucky lately in its
biographers; Lord Ponsonby’s Evelyn has followed hard
on the heels of Mr Bryant’s Pepys; it is not Lord
Ponsonby’s fault that he cannot lay claim to finality in
his study. Mr Bryant had at his disposal the complete
diary, and all the papers collected by Tanner and
Wheatley. But Evelyn’s diary remains to-day in great
part unpublished, and Lord Ponsonby was denied access
to the manuscripts at Wotton, and was even refused per-
mission to see the house and grounds. All the more

2 66

JOHN EVELYN

praise is due to him for a biography which certainly
ranks as high as Mr Bryant's. There is no nonsense about
Lord Ponsonby’s work, no trying flowers of fancy, and
the character of Evelyn emerges, the more clearly for his
biographer’s restraint, in its slight conceit, its rather silly
pedantry ("You will consult,’ Evelyn wrote to Pepys,
when the latter was contemplating his history of the navy,
‘Fulvius Ursinus, Goltzius, Monsieur St Amant, Otto,
Dr Spon, Vaillant, Dr Patin and the most learned
Spankemius 5 ), in its essential goodness.

1934

267

BACKGROUND FOR HEROES

‘He drank a little tea and some sherry. He wound up his
watch, and said, now he had done with time and was
going to eternity . 3 So Burnet on Lord William Russell’s
last hour. History may no longer consist of the biographies
of great men, but perhaps our deepest pleasure in Miss
Thomson’s analysis* of the account books belonging to
the Bedford household at Woburn remains in our aware-
ness that this is the way of life of a familiar hero, the life
he set a period to with the winding of his watch. "William,
the fifth earl, with whose domestic economy this book
chiefly deals, was happy in having no history, but there
is an extra-special interest in the fact that his heir,
W illiam Russell, was brought up among these surround-
ings, the huge house of ninety rooms, including the little
artificial grotto with the gilt chairs and the Bedford arms
among the shells and stalagmites ; that he read in this
library so ponderously stocked with the works of Baxter
(not one play, not a single volume of even sacred poetry),
took his impress even from the gardens designed and
stocked (the details are here) by the beloved John Field,
was fed and clothed out of the family bank, the great
chest in Bedford House made in the Netherlands £ painted
in the characteristic Dutch fashion, squares showing
prim landscapes and flowers, roses and tulips’.

Miss Thomson in a book of great fascination — with
little but account books to draw on she has composed a
picture of a family as complete as that contained in the
Vemey Memoirs — analyses the duties and expenditure
of the various officials belonging to a household more than
regal in its wealth: the receiver-general dealing with the

* Life in a Noble Household , 1641-1700, Gladys Scott Thomson.
268

BACKGROUND FOR HEROES

money chest in Bedford Street, the steward of the west
looking after the estates in Devon and the neighbouring
counties, the steward of the household, the gentleman of
the horse, the clerk of the kitchen, the tutor buying books
for the library, the gardener plants for the Woburn
gardens. The household leaps into life in the small
details: the maid Rose lending her master five shillings
at a moment of sudden need, sixpence given to a scolding
woman who wasn’t satisfied with the bargain struck for
the hire of a horse, a £ hawk called Tomson\

Historically the chief interest is in the financial change
towards the technique of modem banking from the early
cumbrous method by which all the money for the house-
hold was kept in the great chest (the income from the
western estates being paid by bills of exchange drawn on
a London goldsmith, the money fetched by porters, a
thousand pounds at a time, in sacks from Lombard Street
to Bedford Street). For the first time in the middle ’bo’s
the money for the chest was laid out first on deposit and
then on credit account with the goldsmith, and modem
banking methods may be said really to have started in
1687, when the rents were paid directly into the account
with Child and Rogers and the great chest lay almost
empty. We watch other changes: the first appearance in
the wine cellars of glass bottles instead of stone (1658), in

1664 the purchase of ‘Shably 5 , the first mention of the
wine in any account book known to M. Andre Simon, in

1665 the first purchase of ‘Shampaigne 5 , and in 1684 of
port. It is like the gradual development of a family
photograph. William Russell may still in his studied
scaffold gestures belong to the obscure heroic age, but
the details of a life we share are springing up all round him.

I have only one complaint to make of this ingenious

269

SOME CHARACTERS

book, and that is that Aiiss Thomson does not print, in an
appendix, the complete catalogue of the 152 books in the
Duke’s library at Woburn and the 247 in Bedford House.
A great many Baxters and other divines (curiously
enough Aiiss Thomson mentions nothing by Burnet,
that popular death-bed vulture who was with William
Russell at the end), a few books of ceremony, a little
travel, the usual crop of anti-Catholic works published at
the time of the Plot, and for light relief a few ‘ twopenny
dreadfuls’. Murder in Gloucestershire , The Murder in
Essex, The Prentice that Murdered his Mistress: it is a
sombre collection and compares oddly with another con-
temporary library known to us, with its Juvenal and
Homer, Dryden and Burton, Milton, Donne, Denham
and Montaigne and ‘the Matchless Orinda’. A family
libraiy is a breeding-place of character, and the great
Puritan family would have felt justified in their aversion
to poetry and the humanities if they had been able to
contrast the library in which the political martyr studied
with that of ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, Sir Charles Sedley,
‘a very necessary man among us women’.

1937

270

A HOAX ON MR HULTON

No one, I suppose, will ever discover the authors of the
odd elaborate hoax played on Mr Hulton, the elderly
printseller of Pall Mall, in 1744; the story itself has been
hidden all these years in an old vellum manuscript book
I bought the other day from a London bookseller. With
its vivid unimportance it brings alive the geography of
eighteenth-century tradesman’s London, the wine-
merchants at Wapping, the clockmakers in Fleet Street,
the carriers and printers and bust-makers, all the ag-
grieved respectable victims of an anarchic imagination,
and in the background memories of Layer’s conspiracy
and the word ‘Jacobite’ and a vague uneasiness.

The story is told in letters and occasional passages of
dialogue with notes in the margin on the behaviour of the
characters. It might be fiction if these people did not all
belong to fact. Who copied it out ? It is hard to believe
that any innocent person could have known so much. Mr
Hulton suspected his apprentices, and the whole world;
there was a young man called Mr Poet Rowzei, who knew
more than he should have done; and an auctioneer, for
some reason of his own, spoke of an upholsterer.

It began quite childishly on 21 January, 1744, with a
letter which purported to come from Mr Scott, a carpen-
ter of Swallow Street, who wrote that he had many frames
to make for the Prussian Ambassador, that he was ill of
the gout and his men were overworked, and would Mr
Hulton call on him. Mr Hulton had the gout himself, but
he limped to Mr Scott’s house, when ‘finding the whole
was an imposition upon him and Scott, he hobbled
back again muttering horrible imprecations against
the letter-writer all the way’. Two days later the hoax
really got under way. A stream of unwanted people

271

SOME CHARACTERS

arrived at Mr Hulton’s shop: Mr Hazard, a cabinet
maker of the "Hen and Chickens’ in London’s Inn, with
a quantity of Indian paper; Mr Dard, a toy maker from
the King’s Arms in the Strand, who had received a letter
from the pseudo-Hulton offering to sell him a curious
frame; a surgeon to bleed him, and a doctor from Bedlam.
It would take too long to describe the events of these
crowded days, how a Mr Boyd brought snuffboxes and
Mrs Hulton had to buy one to quiet him before her
husband returned, how Air Scarlett, an optician, arrived
loaded with optic glasses, and was so ill-used by Mr
Hulton that he threatened proceedings, how Mr Rutter,
a dentist of Fleet Street, came to operate on an impos-
tume, and was turned away by Mrs Hulton, who preten-
ded her husband had died of it. Three pounds of
anchovies arrived, and the printer of the Harlaeian Mis-
cellany , who was pushed roughly out of doors, and Mr
Cock, an auctioneer in the Great Piazza, who "muttered
something of an Irish upholsterer’, and a female optician
called Deane — Mrs Hulton bolted the door against her,
and spoke to her through the pane, which Mrs Deane
broke. "Mr Hulton at the noise of breaking glass came
forth from his little parlour into the shop, and was saluted
by a porter with a dozen of port wine.’ By this time he
was losing control, and when Mr Rogers, a shoemaker of
Maiden Lane, wanted to measure him, "Mr Hulton lost
all temper . . . and cursing, stamping and swearing, in an
outrageous manner, he so frightened Mr Rogers that the
poor man, who is a Presbyterian, ran home to Covent
Garden without once looking behind him.’ After that
Mr Hulton shut up his shop, and went to bed for three
days, so the man who had been told he had a peruke-
maker’s shop to dispose of failed to get him. Even when

272

A HOAX ON MR HULTON

the shop reopened, Mr Hulton thought it safer to stay
upstairs and leave things to his son. His son too was
choleric and what he did to a young oculist who thought
his father needed spectacles is unprintable here.

On 2 February there is a break in the record, twenty-
seven pages missing; but when the story begins again on
4 September Mr Hulton is still on the run. Three dozen
bottles of pale ale arrived that day; Mr Hulton was
obliged to pay for them, and * Mrs Hulton and her maid
were fuddled while it lasted’. We must pass over the
incident of the silversmith’s wife, who pulled off Mrs
Hulton’s nightcap, and the venison-pasty man who saw
through the deceit, and enclosed the pseudo-Hulton’s
letter in piecrust and sent it to Mr Hulton (the crust was
given to the dog Cobb as they suspected poison), A more
subtle form of hoax was in train. It began with an illiter-
ate letter to Mr Pinchbeck (son of Edward Pinchbeck,
inventor of the alloy), accusing Hulton of having abused
him "in a monstrous manner’ at a tavern, but this plot
misfired ; the two victims got together over a four-shilling
bowl of punch.

It was then that the Reverend Aaron Thompson, of
Salisbury, came on the scene (he who had baptized the
conspirator Layer’s child and allowed the Pretender to
be a godparent by proxy). Somebody using his name
ordered a number of articles which he said his agent
Hulton would pay for — four canes with pinchbeck heads,
a bust of Mr Pope, a set of The Gentleman's Magazine ,
"the books (of which you know the titles) against Bishop
Berkley’s Tar-Water’, a complete set of Brindley’s
Classics, and even a chariot. This persecution caused Mr
Hulton to write to Mr Thompson accusing him of being
a Papist and a Jacobite and threatening him with the

IS — OE.G.G.

273

SOME CHARACTERS

pillory, and the amazed Air Thompson ‘receiving this
letter kept himself three weeks in a dark room lest he
should see a letter of any kind: by the persuasion of his
wife, he at length came forth; but wore a thin handker-
chief over his eyes for about a month". A lot of people’s
nerves were getting jumpy as the hoax enlarged its scope,
taking in Bath and such worthy local characters as Mr
Jeremy Peirce, author of an interesting little book about
a tumour, and Mr Archibald Cleland, the surgeon who,
it may be remembered, was concerned with Smollett in a
controversy over the Bath waters. They all received
letters from the pseudo-Hulton, Cleland being told that
Thompson had libelled him and Peirce that Thompson
had ordered him a set of The Rake's Progress . The real
Aaron Thompson was by now convinced that he was the
victim of a mad printseller, just as Hulton believed he
w r as the victim of a mad clergyman, and they both — egged
on by their pseudo-selves — appealed to a Mr Pitt of
Salisbury, who assumed they both were mad. The story
becomes inextricably confused with counter-accusations,
the pseudo-Hulton writing to the real Aaron Thompson:

‘You write, you read, you muzz or muse as you call it,
till you are fitter for Bedlam than the Pulpit: poor man!
poor Aaron Thompson. I remember you in Piccadilly
knocking at the great Gates and returning bow for bow
to the bowing Dean, your lean face, your awkward bow,
your supercilious nod of the head are still in my mind . .

and the pseudo-Thompson would send the accusation
flying back, regretting to hear that Hulton and all his
family had gone mad, and recalling his strange way of
walking about his shop ‘and turning his thumbs one over

274

A HOAX ON MR HULTON

another a sure sign of madness’. And all the while goods
continued to pour in, particularly drink — three gallons of
the best Jamaica rum from Wapping New- Stairs, which
Mrs Hulton drank and paid for, a gallon of canary, a
gallon of sherry, and a pint of Madeira,

We shall never know the end — the last pages are tom
out with any clue they might have contained to the hoaxer.
It was an age of practical jokes, and he may have been
one of those who baited Pinchbeck because he was a
‘King’s friend’, mocking at his nocturnal remembran-
cers and writing odes about his patent snuffer. Perhaps
Hulton, by his careful prosperity, had aroused the same
balked malice of men who sympathize with the defeated
and despise the conqueror and dare do nothing but
trivial mischief to assert their independence — as next
year proved when Charles Stuart turned back from
Derby,

1939

275

A JACOBITE POET

lx 1679 the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, visited
Cambridge University. She was a little over twenty, very
graceful and witty 7 and cunning. Even Burnet found it
hard to speak ill of her at that time : c all her diversion was
innocent cheerfulness, with a little mixture of satirical
wit’. George Granville, a thirteen-year-old Master of
Arts and already a poet, read her an address in couplets
in the library of Trinity 7 College. The couplets were more
formal and sedate than the poems "to Myra’ which
followed, for these later poems were the fruit of his eyes,
and remembering his age and the rank and beauty of the
girl, it is not hard to recapture the emotion of that moment
when he dedicated himself, like a troubadour, to her
service:

No warning of tli approaching flame ;

Swiftly , like sudden death , it came ,

he wrote in a poem which I wish Miss Handasyde* had
quoted for she has been a litde less than just to her sub-
ject. Her biography is a brilliant example of by-way
scholarship, comparable to Miss Waddell’s The Wander-
ing Scholars and Miss Tomkins’s The Popular Novel in
England for its grace and erudition; she writes with in-
sight of Granville’s verse:

‘The general impression made by his songs is of some-
thing sweet and sad and infinitely faint, like the tinklings
of the musical boxes whose glassy roulades come slightly
muffled from the dust of last century. He was old-
fashioned even in his own day; for his poems, published
* Granville the Polite: The Life of George Granville Lord
Lansdowne, by Eliza b eth Handasyde.

276

A JACOBITE POET

in the cold dawn of the Age of Reason, belong by senti-
ment and even by date to the warm uncritical twilight of
the Restoration’

but she has, I think, missed that touch of fatality which
raises Lansdowne’s life to the level of tragedy; minor
tragedy, for everything he touched from a play to a con-
spiracy was doomed to be minor.

Mary of Modena ruined him as she ruined many more
important men. If she had not visited Cambridge that
year Granville would have found a safer inspiration; he
might have lived and died quite happily a minor poet and
dramatist. During the reign of William he passed a
pleasant exile from court, writing poetry'- and improving
Shakespeare. He had admirers and flatterers; Pope
immortalized him in Windsor Forest: ‘What Muse for
Granville can refuse to sing?’; Dryden in beautifully-
weighted verse resigned him his laurels — a gesture a little
spoilt by the actor Pow r elFs comment (one remembers
Colley Cibber’s study of 4 giddy ’ Powell, how 4 he naturally
lov’d to set other people wrong’): ‘this great Wit, with
his Treacherous Memory, forgets, that he had given away
his Laurells upon record, no less than twice before, viz.,
once to Mr Congreve, and another time to Mr Southeme \
But during that swift moment in Trinity Library Gran-
ville had mortgaged his future. Inevitably when William
died he was drawn into politics, trying to hold a balance
between the brilliant and erratic Bolingbroke and cau-
tious, trimming Harley. He married, too, unluckily, to
become later, through his hopeless idealism, a complaisant
husband, shutting his eyes with miserable fidelity to his
wife’s affairs. With that instinct for doing the right thing,
which sometimes conflicted with the still deeper instinct

277

SOME CHARACTERS

for being on the wrong side, he inscribed these lines on a
glass in which her toast was drunk:

If I not love you , Villiers , more
Than ever Mortal loved before ,

With such a Passion fixt and sure ,

As ev'n Possession could not cure ,

Never to cease but with my Breath;

May then this Bumper be my Death .

He was not unfaithful to Myra : all his loves were platonic
(in spite of children).

After Queen Anne’s death he soon became involved in
the same chain of circumstances as drew the fiery Atter-
bury from the see of Rochester to a peevish senility in
Rome. It began with secret letters, proceeded inevitably
through house searchings (manuscripts of unpublished
poems were burned by his servants, who mistook them
for dangerous documents), imprisonment, financial ruin
and exile on the Continent. Walpole’s government was
hardly more corrupt than the Jacobite court. Miss Hand-
asyde describes in detail the libels and bickerings and
jealousies of Paris. It was not an air which suited the
foolish idealism but unselfish fidelity of Lansdowne; he
was happy for a while, raised to the dizzy height of a
shadow dukedom, but the bubble eventually burst. He had
heard plenty of other men falsely accused of treachery,
and his own turn came. He was called a traitor by James’s
sister-in-law, the Princess of Turenne, at the Hotel de
Bouillon, ‘where all France assembles ’. He wrote a letter
of pathetic literary dignity to James III, he paraphrased
Shakespeare and declared : * God knows, sir, I have had no
occasion to betray you ; if I had consider’d my fortune I

278

A JACOBITE POET

needed but to have forsaken you.’ The son of Mary of
Modena did not reply and Lansdowne made his peace
with Hanover,

He had ten more years of life, spent much of it in
literary controversy (characteristically his feud was against
the dead and on behalf of the dead), revised an old play
and called it (again characteristically) Once a Lover ; and
always a Lover . It brought. Miss Handasyde writes, *a
pale reflection of the glitter and polish of Congreve on to
the dull and respectable stage of George Lilloand Moore \
His niece was a little shocked by it; her uncle was old-
fashioned, He died a fortnight after his wife, who had
buzzed busily from infidelity to infidelity till the end. His
life had not been a very happy one. Fortune had con-
sistently frowned on him, fobbing him off with occasional
fictitious successes, like his shadow dukedom. He had
written with some wit:

Fickle and false to others she may be,
I can complain but of her constancy .

CHARLES CHURCHILL

When Charles Churchill died in Boulogne in 1764, all
the English ships in the harbour struck their colours.
Fifty years later Byron found his grave neglected, among
‘the thick deaths of half a century 5 , and the gardener
quite ignorant of Churchill’s fame. The very quality in
his work which gave him immediate popularity (he
profited nearly one thousand pounds, Mr Laver states,*
by his two first poems) made his name short-lived. Like
other minor satirists, Rochester and Oldham, he was
down in the dust of the every-day battle; his satires are
less often of the great than of those small tiresome pro-
vocative men as teasing as horse-flies whom history for-
gets. Dryden’s satires belonged from the first to history;
Churchill’s to the newspapers; and his poems have the
fascination of an old news-sheet still stained from the
coffee-house, the charm of something evanescent which
has survived against all odds.

Here are the echoes of queer cases and queer people:
Mary Tofts of Godalming who bore, according to her
own account, a litter of fifteen rabbits; Betty Canning,
who claimed that she had been kidnapped by a procuress ;
the Cock Lane Ghost, as fraudulent as either; the
Chaplain of the Lock Hospital, who wrote a book in
favour of polygamy ; the Rev. John Browne, the dramatist
who committed suicide because his doctors forbade him
to go to St Petersburg to organize Russian education for
the Empress; and all the horde of actors who in their
beginnings were everything in the world but men of the
theatre: sadier, wigmaker, tallow chandler, apothecary,
old Etonian, bar-tender, silversmith, wine merchant.

Mr Laver’s notes on these people are invaluable, but

* The Poems of Charles Churchill, edited by James Laver.

280

CHARLES CHURCHILL

he seems uncertain in what educational strata he will find
his readers. This beautiful edition can hardly be intended
for an ignorant public, and its purchasers might be
spared some of the notes — on Clive, David Garrick, and
Sir Isaac Newton for example. Otherwise if the notes err
at all, it is that they are too businesslike. With the horrid
example before him of Tooke, Churchill's former editor,
Mr Laver has been afraid of digressions. Something is
lost. One misses in the note on W^oodward, the comic
actor, this revealing touch: 4 The moment he opened his
mouth on the stage, every’ muscle of his face ranged itself
on the side of levity. The very tones of his voice inspired
comic ideas, and though he often wished to act tragedy,
he could never speak one serious line with propriety.’ A
note like this is more valuable than the date of a birth and
a death.

The comparison of Churchill to Rochester is inevitable.
Both satirists died worn out in the early thirties; both
were men without moral fastidiousness, the frequenters
of brothels, who, retiring at intervals to be cured from
the same diseases, damned the world for the vices they
did not share (one remembers Gleeson White’s remark
quoted by Mr Yeats: 4 Wilde will never lift his head
again, for he has against him all men of infamous life’).
Both remained loyal to one friend, Rochester to Savile,
Churchill to Wilkes, and to one mistress (Elizabeth Barry
joins hands across the years with Elizabeth Carr). The
comparison must not be drawn too closely. Churchill was
a far finer satirist. Rochester’s lines were too rough and
angry; he had not the coolness of temper to find, as
Churchill did, the final damning epithet. These lines on
Webberbum are beyond the accomplishment of un-
controlled hate:

28 1

SOME CHARACTERS

To mischief train'd, e'en from his mother's womb ,
Grown old in frauds though yet in manhood's bloom ,
Adopting arts by which gay villains rise.

And reach the heights which honest men despise ;

Mute at the bar, and in the senate loud.

Dull ' mongst the dullest, proudest of the proud,

A pert, prim, prater of the northern race.

Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face,

Stood forth; and thrice he waved his lily hand.

And thrice he twirl'd his tye, thrice stroked his band .

There are moments when Churchill stands almost level
with Dryden and Pope; it is only because his lyrical
talents were so inferior to his satirical that in the final
estimate he cannot be ranked with Rochester, perhaps not
even with Oldham. Mr Laver picks out of Gotham, his
rather tedious essay in Utopian politics, a few charming
lines on flowers as formal as a Dutch parterre. They are
hardly enough to justify even Mr Laver’s modest claim
that ‘in his rural retreat he had time to look about him,
the sights and sounds of the country steal imperceptibly
into his verse 5 . He was urban through and through. If he
had not given all his genius to satire, he might possibly
have made a reputation as a lyric poet, but he would have
belonged to the school of Prior. The lines which conclude
the first book of The Ghost (a poem Mr Laver rather
underestimates) have all Prior’s prettiness, saved by all
his sophistication:

Give us an entertaining sprite ,

Gentle, familiar, and polite ,

One who appears in such a form
As might an holy hermit warm,

282

CHARLES CHURCHILL

Or z vho on f owner schemes refines ,

And only talks by sounds and signs,

Who mil not to the eye appear s
But pays her visits to the ear ,

And knocks so gently 3 ’ tzvould 7iot fright
A lady in the darkest night .

Swc/z zs our Fanny , zc/uu* f ooi crz7/,
Which cannot in the grave lie still ,
Brings her on earth to entertain
Her friends and lovers in Cock Lane.

*933

283

THE LOVER OF LEEDS

Ralph Thoresby, the topographer of Leeds, traced —
rather dubiously — his family back to the reign of Canute;
and certainly he could not have picked a better origin for
a topographer than the reign of a king who tried to turn
back the tide. That is the hopeless task on which they are
all engaged, beating time back from a gravestone, a piece
of pottery, a grassy mound. One finds them on their
knees in little country churches rubbing brasses: they
push ungainly bicycles up steep country lanes towards a
Roman vallum : they publish at their own expense the
churchwardens’ accounts of Little Bilburv. Vestry books
and Enclosure Acts ruin their eyesight. It is one of the
most innocent — and altruistic — of human activities, for
a topographer never becomes a rich man through his
researches : no Kidd’s treasure has ever been discovered
under a hawk-stone, at best a piece of Roman piping; and
fame in their lifetime is severely limited to men of their
own kind and after death to historians’ footnotes, unless
like Aubrey or Anthony a Wood some eccentricity, some
untopographical malice, catches the attention of posterity.
Often they are clergymen — they have so much to do with
churches, sometimes they are civil engineers (the profes-
sion somehow goes with the bicycle), and sometimes, as
in the case of Thoresby, merchants.

Thoresby, the unsuccessful cloth merchant, will never
be a popular figure like Aubrey and Wood, although he
kept a diary — the town he chose is perhaps against him,
for who today will trouble to hunt through the streets of
that black city for the sites of his mills and bridges ? But
none the less in honesty, disinterestedness, piety, and
precision he may be taken as the pattern of a topographer.
I don’t know what the dictionary distinction may be be-

284

THE LOVER OF LEEDS

tween a topographer and an antiquarian, but I think of an
antiquarian as a man who dwells permanently among the
hawk-stones and valiums , never coming nearer to his own
day than a wapentake , one with little interest in human
beings — in So-and-So who must pay to the Church use
4 at Wytsentyd next a stryk of mawilte 5 and somebody else
who was a ‘defrauder’ and owes 2d. The topographer
takes a small familiar patch of ground and repopulates it:
he experiments with time as much as Mr Dunne, so that
it is not Leeds — or your own country parish— as you
know it that he presents, so much as a timeless God’s-eye
Leeds with all the houses that ever stood there re-erected,
interpenetrating. Is the result something nearer Leeds
than a guide book, a collection of photographs, a map ?
One doesn’t know, but certainly men like Thoresby, and
earlier men like Plot and Aubrey, thought so, and even if
we do not share their religious belief (I have yet to come
across an atheistic topographer), their work attracts
by its very inutility. Out of wars and the decay of civili-
zations the historian may spin theories which whether
true or not can affect human lives, but this — this is
beautifully useless, this precise painstaking record of
superseded stone.

‘ A little above this is the Moot-Hall in the Front of the
Middle-Row, on one side of which is one of the best-
furnished Flesh-Shambles in the North of England; on
the other the Wool-Market for Broad-Cloth which is the
All in All.’

There speaks the lover, the lover of what you see in the
plate called ‘The Prospect of Leeds’ — two churches, a
town hall like a German toy, a little river with a few

285

SOME CHARACTERS

sailing ships and a bridge, and perhaps two hundred
houses trailing gently off into the fields where an artist
sits on the grass.

What sort of life do topographers lead ? We know the
bicycle and the back bent by brasses, but if we want to
know more we cannot do better than read Thoresby’s
diary. For the times, with topographers, hardly change.
Bom just before the Restoration, Thoresby’s period
included the Popish Plot, the Revolution, the wars with
France. The wars did affect him — they made the price of
paper dear and delayed a little the publication of Ducatus
Leodiensis , and at the time of the Revolution the rumour
that the Irish were ravaging the country, spread by God
knows what Orange agents, struck home in Leeds with a
night alarm — c Horse and arms ! Horse and arms ! Beeston
is burnt, and only some escaped to bring the doleful
tidings!’ — a fine topographical lament. Yet Thoresby
admits himself that he was 4 more immediately concerned 5
that year with a little fire in his house which burnt his
children’s coats hanging on a line. No, he had little
interest in great events, in his trade or even the govern-
ment of his local town. He paid a fine of £ 20 rather than
be an alderman and his eventual Conversion 5 from non-
conformity was partly, one feels, due to the presence of
good antiquarians on the bench of bishops, partly his
desire simply to avoid trouble — for the sake of his studies.
There is a charming passage in which he refers to a
friend’s ‘little Paradise, his library 5 , but Thoresby him-
self was no bookworm. He would ride miles to hear a
story, to copy an epitaph, to preserve from time . . .
Topographers are not selective — everyone who ever lived,
any building which ever existed, contributes to the ideal
city, so that the habit of collecting grows and Thoresby’s

286

THE LOVER OF LEEDS

museum included such various things as a toothbrush
from Mecca, the Crown of an Indian King, a large
Prussian Boot, the hand and arm of quartered Montrose,
just as his successors collected postage stamps, cigarette
cards, even tram tickets. Pedigrees of all the leading
families, 4 strange accidents’ like the ‘Stones that came
out of the Hands and Feet of the Rev. and pious Mr
Blackboard, once Lecturer at Leedes ’ — ail were part of
this city in the mind. Sometimes he arrived too late: we
watch him peer in vain at an inscription: ‘Alexander
Foster, who departed this life the 27th June, 167 , * .
aetat 61 :

Once to our liking growing daily fast>

But by Death's , . .at the last .

The rest not legible. 5

But one is glad he was in time to preserve from weather
and lichen:

Under this Stone doe lye six children small
Of John Willington of the North-hall ,

and this sad conceit:

Here near God's Temple lies at rest
A Martyn in his Earthly Nest .

Alas! a topographer needs a topographer in turn to
preserve what he has preserved. Thoresby’s book, of
course, is there, but his collection left to a clerical son was
sold, scattered, destroyed. Montrose’s arm found a
temporary home with a Dr Burton, but against other

287

SOME CHARACTERS

items in the auctioneer’s catalogue there are grim notes.
‘Eggs — All broken’, ‘Serpents — Thrown away’, ‘Plants
— all rotten and thrown on the dunghill 5 . And as for
Leeds itself— well, we may question whether the dung-
hill, too, was not its proper destination, though Thoresby
w r ould not have thought so, glad of a chance to record
another century of sooty life. He would have said, per-
haps, with his plainness and simplicity and the smirk of
satisfaction you see on his portrait, that one can fare
further and fare worse, and it is true that his own family
came to an abrupt end in far away Calcutta, in a worse
Black Hole than his ideal city was ever to become.

1938

288

INSIDE OXFORD

The place lies there below you roughly in the shape of a
cross — or a man pegged out on a table for examination.
His legs lie up the Banbury and the Woodstock roads
among the don’s wives and Ruskin villas; one arm goes
out by the High and the other extends past the stations
towards Botley which the Devil visited a few years ago;
a thin neck stretches by Christ Church and Pembroke,
and the poor head — that, I’m afraid, must lie — not un-
suitably— in St Aldates among a jumble of old houses,
mean streets and shops selling confectionery', second-
hand boots and fishing tackle. Now for the operation.
Make an incision: lay back a flap of the flesh and see
what’s there — in the region of the breast — in a timeless
Dunne-like eternity. There goes Professor Freeman, the
man who made the Victorians Anglo-Saxon-conscious so
that they called their dogs Wulfric and their sons Ethel-
bert (I have an old faded letter of his in which the ruling
passion rather quaintly expresses itself: ‘The wives of
priests and bishops are spoken of civilly in Domesday:
that is to say they are entered without remark’) ; there he
goes ‘repeating poetry to himself as he walked in the
streets, and occasionally leaping into the air when the
poem moved him to any enthusiasm’. Another flap is
raised, and there is the austere face of the late Dr Famdl,
as he tries ‘to stiffen our standard of living’, objecting to
the cafe habit, ‘undergraduates of both sexes sitting
there together indulging themselves with pleasant con-
versation and unnecessary and unmanly food’.

The compilers of this fascinating and very funny
anthology* have divided it into four parts— the Place,

* Anatomy of Oxford , an Anthology compiled by C Day Lewis
and Charles Fenby.

19— OE.G.G. 289

SOME CHARACTERS

the Seniors, the Juniors, and Etcetera, with interludes of
witty and often wise discussion, and the subdivisions which
include such subjects as Visiting Oxford (Verlaine read-
ing his poems in a room behind Blackwell’s shop watched
by an anxious Fellow: Thackeray insulted by several
bland illiterate dons), Crimes and Punishments ( e It is
startling to realize that if, while passing through Oxford,
or even Reading [Givmett v. Wittingham> i 6 Q.R.D. 761]
for the first time, a citizen of York is knocked down by
the negligent conduct of a member of the University, the
former is deprived of all remedy and relief in the High
Court of Justice’), Scandals, Famous Men, and Strange
and Original Characters. In that rich section my own
favourite is Dr Kettel, the seventeenth-century President
of Trinity — ‘He did not care for the country revells be-
cause they tended to debauchery. Sayd he, at Garsington
revell, Here is, Hey for Garsington! and Hey for Cud-
desdon! and Hey Hockley! but here’s nobody cries. Hey
for God Almighty ! 9 Trinity has a wealth of such charac-
ters, for Dr Kettel is followed by Dr Bathurst who was
detected throwing stones at Balliol windows, and it is an
encouraging thought that the Trinity tradition is
admirably maintained to this day.

A review of so delightful a collection cannot fail to
degenerate into an anthology of an anthology. As we
would expea, Anthony Wood and Hearae are strongly
represented, and I am grateful to the compilers for intro-
ducing me to the Reminiscences of the Rev. W. Tuckwell
and to the anonymous contributor to the Oxford Mail
(can it be one of the compilers ?) who acts as our con-
temporary Aubrey. I am less grateful for the frequent
quotations from George Cox’s dull poem Red Coats and
Black Gozcns > especially when no room is found for

290

INSIDE OXFORD

Merton Walks . May one hope that this collection may
prove popular enough to justify many editions and
additions, a section say for Ghosts — the Pembroke ghost
(whom men cannot recognize as a ghost, but after seeing
him — in the shape of a scout, a tutor, who knows ? — they
commit suicide), the Merton and the Balliol ghosts and
the unknown inhabitants of 10 Hoi ywell. Among
Curiosities I miss the Devil’s signature at Queen’s, and
there are more or less contemporary scandals and hoaxes
which deserve to be collected as soon as they are safe from
the law of libel: one may now record the bogus Prime
Minister’s telephone call to the late Sir Herbert Warren
at Magdalen offering him the Poet Laureateship, an
appointment he immediately announced to his guests at
dinner. And to the Strange and Original Characters I
hope it may be possible to add that distinguished necro-
mancer always to be seen in the company of his familiar
who sometimes takes the shape of an undergraduate and
sometimes that of a small black dog*

From the distant past a few characters neglected by
the compilers still clamour for recognition: the servant
of Trinity (Trinity again) who kept a brothel, the Swiss
barber called Le Maltre who burgled the Ashmolean and
got away — temporarily — with a gold coin of the Emperor
Otto, and Captain Nathaniel Ogle, R.N., who drove the
first steam carriage through Oxford in 1832 accompanied
by his negro servant Xurary.

1938

* One may safely now record his name— the questionably
Reverend Montague Summers.

291

[ 2 ]

GEORGE DARLEY

A book yet remains to be written on the tragedy of those
rare poets who have been ruined by their own lack of
conceit. It is a curious psychological fact that men with
interest almost entirely intellectual will suffer a sense of
inferiority and shame from a purely physical defect,
which will sometimes cancel their whole work. There are
cases, naturally, where that shame has not been disas-
trous, but none the less it has been present. Byron was
driven by his lame leg to a bitter isolation and to satire:
from the calm, but somewhat too facile loveliness of ‘ She
w T alks in beauty like the night 5 to the tortured medley of
buffoonery and grandeur which he called Don Juan .
Byron’s shame was our gain. Stevenson, however much
he might sound the brazen trumpet of his heroics, was
ashamed of his consumptive body. c Shall we never shed
blood ?’ he asked, only half-humorously, and he hoped
that in the swords’ clash of Kidnapped , his readers would
forget that one man, by no stretch of imagination, could
ever put himself in the round house with Alan Breck.
And yet, because he too was forced like Byron, though by
more material circumstances, into isolation, we have
gained a level controlled prose as likely to endure as that of
Addison, and at least one great novel Weir of Hermiston.

George Darley’s defect compared with that of Byron
and that of Stevenson seems small and very ludicrous.
He had a stutter, and perhaps its lack of any possibility
of a romantic pose made it the harder to bear. He was a
poet of infinite potentiality, and he spent his poetic life
almost entirely on the writing of pretty songs and un-
actable plays. Now, more than a hundred years since his
death, his work, and among most even his name, is for-

292

GEORGE BARLEY

gotten. He is to be found occasionally in anthologies —
Robert Bridges included a large number of extracts from
his Nepenthe in The Spirit of Man — and to the general
public he is known, if he is known at all, as the author of
a charming song, a favourite of the Victorian drawing-
room.

Vve been roaming ! Pve been roaming !

Where the meadow dew is sweet ,

And like a queen Vm coming
With its pearls upon my feet .

Darley was bom in 1795 in Dublin of Irish parents,
the eldest of a family of four sons and three daughters.
His parents went from Ireland to the United States, when
he was still a child, and left him at Springfield, Co.
Dublin, in the care of his grandfather, with whom he
remained until he was about ten years of age. The im-
pediment in his speech was already with him and prob-
ably already exaggerated in a morbid and nervous mind.
But past misery is easily transmuted into happiness, and
later, looking back, he was very ready to find in those
years, in what is known as the Garden of Ireland, joys
which at the time he had not recognized.

‘When a child [he wrote] I thought myself miserable,
but now see that by comparison I was happy, at least all
the “sunshine of the breast” I now enjoy seems a reflec-
tion of that in the dawn of life. I have been to La belle
France and to Bella Italia , yet the brightest sun which
ever shone upon me broke over Baiiybetagh mountains.’

Little of Darley’s early youth is known to us. On his
parents’ return from America he joined them in Dublin,

SOME CHARACTERS

entered Trinity College there in 1815 and graduated in
1820. Science and mathematics had been his studies, and
in his studies he had lived. Human intercourse then, as
later, was less shut out from him by his stutter than by
the morbid introspection into which it plunged him. It
made him first shy and then bold with the exaggerated self-
importance which is so often to be found in dwarfs. He
recoiled and sprang. He was determined in those first
days, when nothing had been tried and therefore nothing
had yet failed, to make the world take notice of him and
forget the stutter. And the world, in the person of passing
acquaintances, would never have noticed the stutter with-
out his own self-conscious underlining. He w T as beautiful
in a delicate, somewhat Shellyan fashion, ‘tall and slight
with the stoop of the student; delicate features slightly
aquiline; eyes not large but very earnest, with often a far
away expression; hair dark brown and waving’. There
were times in those days when he completely forgot his
impediment in excited conversation.

He had not been pre-eminently successful at Trinity
College. Although he had a great talent for mathematics,
his stutter had impeded him in at least one examination.
No high academical post was open to him, and in any
case a career of teaching was impossible. It was therefore
with some sense, as well as some courage, that he flung
himself in 1822 upon literary London, with his first
volume of verse The Errors of Ecstasie. He was twenty-
seven years old, but the majority of the poems must have
been written years before, for they are completely devoid
of merit. The lyrics are full of the conceits of roses and
bees from which the future poet never freed himself.
They are tuneful but seldom musical. The title poem is
a long and very wearisome blank verse dialogue between

294

GEORGE BARLEY

a poet contemplating suicide and the moon. It is of
interest for a few clearly autobiographical lines:

Didst thou not barter Science for a song ?

Thy gown of learning for a sorry mantle ?

and for a very occasional line where Darley is caught in
a youthful pride and defiance which he lost too soon :

I would not change the temper of my blood
For that which stagnates in an idiot's veins ,

To gain the sad salvation of a fool.

When he wrote that, poor and halting though the blank
verse might be, there was hope for Darley. Vitality and
pride, two most necessary sources for poetry, -were
his ‘and at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold 5 .

Literary London was not unkind to the new poet. A
critic wrote of his book that it w r as

‘a work as well of intellect as of temperament, although
his fancy has been inadequately controlled. . . . His
poetry is to be blamed for the wildness of imagination,
not the weakness of sensuality.’

and the next year found him a regular contributor to the
London Magazine . It was the time of the proprietorship
of Taylor and Hessey, when the contributors were in-
vited to meet one another at dinner once a month at the
offices of the firm in Waterloo Place. Here he met De
Quincey, Proctor, Talfourd, Clare, Hazlitt, Hood, whose
finest poems, the Ode to Autumn and the sonnets on
Silence and Death, appeared this very year in the maga-
zine, Henry Cary, the translator of Dante, and Lamb.

295

SOME CHARACTERS

The two latter he was soon able to number among his
few friends. There are occasional references to him in
Lamb’s letters, and he seems to have been a regular
visitor at Enfield, sometimes in the company of Cary,
sometimes in that of Allan Cunningham.

But the shyness induced by the stutter stood in the
way of his friendships. In a volume of tales. The Labours
of Idleness , which he published in 1826 under the name
of Guy Fenseval, he gave a dear picture of his own self-
consciousness. We can see him at Waterloo Place sitting
in the background of the conversation, feeling himself
neglected with a growing and unjust resentment, sud-
denly plunging into the conversation with the same
asperity as characterized the dramatic criticism which he
was now writing for the London Magazine under the
pseudonym of John Lacy:

‘ I always found myself so embarrassed in the presence
of others, and everyone so embarrassed in mine — I was
so perpetually infringing the rule of politeness, saying or
doing awkward things, telling unpalatable truths, or
giving heterodox opinions on matters long since estab-
lished as proper, agreeable, becoming, and the contrary,
by the common creed of the world ; there was so much to
offend and so little to conciliate in my manners, arrogant
at one time, puling at another; dull when I should have
been entertaining; loquacious when I should have been
silent . . . that I quickly perceived obscurity was the
sphere in which Nature had destined me to shine. . . .
At first indeed there were several persons who liked, or
seemed to like me, from a certain novelty or freshness in
my manner, but as soon as that wore off they liked me no
longer. I was “an odd being” or “a young man of some

296

GEORGE DARLEY

genius but very singular” ; something to fill up the gaps
of tea-time conversation when the fineness of the evening
and the beauty of the prospect had already been discussed
by the party. 5

This feeling of inferiority, the idea that people only
‘seemed’ to like him, was no doubt enhanced by the
London dinners, where Lamb and Hood set the key to a
conversation which chiefly consisted in a quick succes-
sion of bad puns. And yet Barley had met with un-
deserved good fortune. He had established himself in
literary London with one book of very mediocre verse
and a volume of short stories, interspersed with lyrics.
And Sylvia was growing in his head, Sylvia which was to
set him upon the pinnacle of fame. The idea that he was
carrying a masterpiece in his mind must have made the
alternatively shy and aggressive poet almost insupport-
able. Beddoes wrote to Kelsall in 1824, after a visit to
Mrs Shelley’s:

‘Barley is a tallish, slender, pale, light-eyebrowed,
gentle-looking bald pate, in a brown suit and with a duo-
decimo under his arm — stammering to a most provoking
degree, so much so as to be almost inconversible — he is
supposed to be writing a comedy or tragedy, or perhaps
both in one. 5

The filibustering medical poet from the sea coast of
Bohemia was not likely to find Barley attractive, and in
1826 he wrote to Proctor from Hanover a little impatient-
ly: ‘ Is Barley delivered yet ? I hope he’s not a mountain. 5

The next year Sylvia appeared, a pretty fairy comedy
— as Miss Mitford said— ‘something between A Mid -
summer Night's Dream and The Faithful Shepherdess'.

297

SOME CHARACTERS

Miss Mitford was charmed by it. So was the future Mrs
Browning, who found it 4 a beautiful pastoral 5 . Lamb
thought it 'a very poetical poem 5 and was pleased with
the stage directions in verse. Beddoes, if he ever read it,
remained discreetly silent, as silent as the public. Yet the
play is very readable, and at one point shows a little of
the swing and power which Darley was later to display in
Nepenthe . In the penultimate scene, the stage directions,
which have been growing looser and looser in texture,
are suddenly abandoned for a vivid comparison between
Byron and Milton:

One gloomy Thing indeed , who now
Lays in the dust his lordly brow,

Had might , a deep indignant sense ,

Proud thoughts , and moving eloquence ;

But oh ! that high poetic strain
Which makes the heart shriek out again
With pleasure half mistook for pain ;

That clayless spirit that doth soar
To some far empyrean shore
Beyond the chartered flight of mind ,

Reckless , repressless , unconfined ,

Springing from off the roofed sky
Into unceiled Infinity . . .

That strain , this spirit was not thine .

But the ears of the public were as firmly closed to the
occasional beauty as to the rather imitative prettiness of
the whole. The mountain had brought forth its mouse.

Darley was not a man with the courage to stand against
silence. Attack might have made him aggressive, silence
only made him question his own powers, the most fatal

298

GEORGE DARLEY

act an artist can commit. He published no other poetry
for public circulation until 1840, when his long and
tedious play Thomas a Bechet, showing the influence of
Sir Henry Taylor, appeared, followed the next year by a
still duller play, Ezhdstan , In writing to Proctor about
the former play, he gave rein to the doubt which had
been haunting him:

‘I am indeed suspicious, not of you but myself; most
sceptical about my right to be called “poet”, and there-
fore it is I desire confirmation of it from others. Why
have a score of years not established my title with the
world ? Why did not Sylvia , with all its faults, ten years
since ? It ranked me among the small poets. I had as soon
be ranked among the piping bullfinches.’

Sylvia's failure drove him back to science. In the next
few years he published a series of volumes on elementary
mathematics, A System of Popular Geometry, A System
of Popular Trigonometry , Familiar Astronomy , and The
Geometrical Companion , several of which became popular.
Indeed from this time on he was linked finally with
mathematics. Carlyle spoke of him as:

‘Darley (George) from Dublin, mathematician, con-
siderable actually, and also poet; an amiable, modest,
veracious, and intelligent man — much loved here though
he stammered dreadfully.’

Sir F. H. Doyle wrote of him as *a man of true genius,
and not of poetical genius alone, for he distinguished
himself also as a mathematician and a man of science",
and Allan Cunningham in The Athenaeum called him *a

299

SOME CHARACTERS

true poet and excellent mathematician’. Darley himself,
in a letter to Cary, wrote:

c I did not mean Mathematics inspired poetry but only
that the Science was absolutely necessary for such an
extravagates as I am. Only for this cooling study I should
be out of my reason probably — like poor Lee’s hero
“knock out all the start” and die like a mad dog foaming.’

But the lyrics that Darley was writing, and occasionally
publishing in the London and The Athenaeum to which
he began to contribute a series of letters from abroad on
foreign art, and his usual truculent dramatic criticism,
show little of the fevered turmoil of mind at which the
letter to Cary hints. That turmoil was to burst out once,
and once only, unforgettably in Nepenthe . Now, as though
his grip upon himself grew, as he became more and more
conscious of the repressed, thw T arted instincts within
himself, the best of his lyrics show a calm, though some-
times complaining, restraint:

Oh nymph ! release me from this rich attire ,

Take off this crown thy artful fingers wove;

And let the wild-rose linger on the brier
Its last sweet days , my love !

For me shalt thou, with thy nice-handed care.
Nought but the simplest wreath of myrtle twine.

Such too , high-pouring Hebe's self must wear ,
Serving my bower with wine .

When his grip relaxed, it was not yet into ungovemed
imagination, but into pretty and cloying fancies, which
sometimes break into a faint beauty of metaphor, as in the

300

SOME CHARACTERS

with Darley. The resemblance does not lie in one solitary
poem, but is continually recurring:

O was it fair:

Fair, kind or pitiful to one

Quite heart-subdued — all bravery done ,

Coyness to deep devotion turned ,

Yet pure the flame with which she burned , —

O was it fair that thou shouldn't come ,

Strong in this weakness , to my home ,

And at my most defenceless hour ,

Midnight , shoulds't steal into my bower ,

In thy triumphant beauty more
Fatal that night than e'er before ?

But it is with the extraordinary Nepenthe that George
Darley will live or die. A few copies of the poem were
printed for private circulation in 1835, as Miss Mitford
wrote,

4 with the most imperfect and broken types, upon a
coarse, discoloured paper, like that in which a country
shop-keeper puts up his tea, with two dusky leaves of a
still dingier hue, at least a size too small, for cover, and
garnished at top and bottom with a running margin in
his own writing/

It was not reprinted until 1897.

Nepenthe is one of the most remarkable poems that the
nineteenth century produced. It was no wonder that
Miss Mitford, before this wild medley of Shelley, Milton,
and Keats, made a single whole by the feverish person-
ality of Darley himself, wrote that 'there is an intoxica-
tion about it that turns one's brain'. Darley himself in a

302

GEORGE DARLEY

letter to Chorley gives a much needed explanation of its
theme:

c to show the folly of discontent with the natural tone of
human life. Canto I attempts to paint the ill-effects of
over-joy; Canto II those of excessive melancholy. Part of
the latter object remains to be worked out in Canto III,
which would otherwise show — if I could ever find confi-
dence, and health and leisure to finish it — that content-
ment with the mingled cup of humanity is the true
“Nepenthe”. 3

But Darley, perhaps because he never found that Nep-
enthe, left the poem a fragment.

The poem opens with the same speed, the same magi-
cal rush of wings, on which it takes its whole course of
1600 odd lines :

Over a bloomier land , untrod
By heavier foot than bird or bee
Lays on the grassy-bosomed sod y
I passed one day in reverie:

High on his unpavilioned throne
The heaven's hot tyrant sat alone >

And like the fabled king of old
Was turning all he touched to gold ,

The poem cannot be followed as a detailed plot. It re-
mains in the mind as a succession of vivid images:

Sudden above my head I heard
The cliff-scream of the thunder-bird ,

The rushing of his forest wings ,

303

SOME CHARACTERS

A hurrica?te when he swoops or springs ,

And saw upon the darkening glade
Cloud-broad his sun-eclipsing shade.

of beautiful episodes — the death of the phoenix, with its
lovely lyric O Blest Unfabled Incense Tree , which has
found a place in many anthologies, and the less known
but no less lovely:

O fast her amber blood doth flow
From the heart wounded Incense Tree
Fast as earth's deep embosomed woe
In silent rivulets to the sea /

Beauty may weep her fair first-bom y
Perchance in as resplendent tears ,

Such golden dewdrops bow the corn
When the stem sickleman appears .

But oh / such perfume to a bower
Never allured sweet-seeking bee ,

As to sip fast that nectar ous shower
A thirstier minstrel drew in me.

Then follows episodes drawn too closely from Keats,
bands of bacchantes and nymphs, who dance with too
self-conscious a flow of drapery. But soon the reader is
whirled again over a changing panorama of sea and land,
India, Petra, Palmyra, Lebanon, Ionia, the Dardanelles,
sees from above the broken body of Icarus tossed back-
wards and forwards upon the reefs, sees Orpheus tom by
the Furies and in a last moment of frenzy the two deaths
are mingled and made his own, in the sound of the waves

304

GEORGE DARLEY

that beat upon Icarus, the sound of the Furies’ voices
calling to the hunt.

In the caves of the deep — Hollo ! Hollo ! —

Lost Youth ! — o’er and o’er fleeting billows l
Hollo / Hollo ! — without all ruth ! —

In the foam’s cold shroud ! — Hollo ! Hello !

To his everlasting sleep ! — Lost Youth !

The second canto is less varied in note and less varied
in sense. Darley falters a little on his long flight, but there
is still much to admire;

From Ind to Egypt thou art one ,

Pyramidal Memphis to Tanjore,

From Ipsambul to Babylon
Reddening the waste suburban o’er ;

From sandlocked Thebes to old Ellore,

Her cavemed roof on columns high
Pitched , like a Giant Breed that bore
Headlong the mountain to the sky .

When it is remembered that this poem was written after
Shelley’s death, when the most noted poets, with the
exception of Wordsworth and Coleridge, were Hood,
£ Barry Cornwall’, Joanna Baillie, and Laetitia Elizabeth
Landon, it is easy to realize something of the consterna-
tion with which it was greeted by Miss Mitford. None of
Darley’s friends, to whom the poem was sent, scans to
have suggested a public printing. They were bewildered,
a little stunned, perhaps inclined to laugh. Even Miss
Mitford, who gave the hungry poet some measured
praise, failed to read his poem to the end. Perhaps Darley
himself was bewildered by this one flash of genius.

20 — C* E.G.G.

305

SOME CHARACTERS

this loud and boisterous changeling of his loneliness. The
last lines of the poem express a wish to leave ‘this busy
broil" for his own accustomed clime:

There to lay me dozen at peace

In my own first nothingness .

Certainly his genius seems to have died at the moment of
its first complete expression. The body of the poet lived
on for another ten years, produced the two monumental
plays, wandered about the Continent, wrote charming
and growingly despondent letters, as the ‘pains, aches,
and petty tortures’ of his ill health increased, to some
pretty cousins in Ireland, and died at last from an un-
romantic decline in London on 23 November 1846, still
uncertain and doubting of his own powers.

Am I really a poet ? was the question which always
haunted him.

‘You may ask could I not sustain myself on the strength
of my own approbation ? But it might be only my vanity,
not my genius, that was strong. . . . Have not I too, had
some, however few, approvers? Why yes, but their
chorus in my praise was as small as the voice of my
conscience, and, like it, served for little else than to keep
me uneasy/

‘Seven long years," he had written to Miss Mitford, in a
letter, ‘startling to receive . . . and terrible to answer",
‘have I lived on a saying of Coleridge’s that he sometimes
liked to take up Sylvia . ’

THE APOSTLES INTERVENE

The Victorians were sometimes less high-minded than
ourselves. The publication of a little booklet on the
Spanish Civil War called Authors Take Sides has
reminded me of an earlier group of English writers
who intervened in Spain a hundred years ago. They
were — questionably — more romantic; they were cert-
ainly less melodramatic; they were a good deal wiser.
‘With all my anger and love, I am for the People of
Republican Spain’ — that is not the kind of remark that
anyone with a sense of the ludicrous should make on
this side of the Channel. Alfred Tennyson did at least
cross the Pyrenees, though his motives, to hysterical
partisans like these, may appear suspect: there is every
reason to suppose that he went for the fun of the thing —
fun which nearly brought Hallam and himself before a
firing squad as it did the unfortunate and quite unserious-
minded Boyd. He doesn’t in later years seem to have
wished to recall the adventure, and only a few lines in the
official life of Tennyson connect him and his Cambridge
club, the Apostles, with the conspiracy of General
Torrijos and the Spanish exiles.

It was the fashion among the Apostles to be Radical, a
fashion less political than literary and metaphysical, con-
nected in some recondite way with the reading of Charles
and Arthur Tennyson’s poetry, with long talks in High-
gate between Coleridge and John Sterling, when the old
poet did most of the talking, starting, according to Haz-
litt, from no premises and coming to no conclusions,
crossing and recrossing the garden path, snuffling softly
of Kant and infinitudes, embroiling poor Sterling for
ever in the fog of theology. When politics were touched on
by the Apostles it was in an amused and rather patronizing

307

SOME CHARACTERS

way. 4 ’Twas a very pretty little revolution in Saxony/
wrote Hailam in 1830, £ and a respectable one at
Brunswick 5 (the dilettante tone has charm after the
sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-
importance of our own ’thirties — 4 1 stand with the People
and Government of Spain’). Only in the rash Torrijos
adventure did the Apostles come within measurable dis-
tance of civil war.

London in 1830 contained a small group of refugees
who had been driven from Spain by the restored Bourbon,
Ferdinand. Ferdinand after his long captivity in Bayonne
had sworn to observe the Constitution. He broke his
oath, dissolved the Cortes, and restored the Inquisition.
After three years of civil war the French bayonets of the
Due d’Angouleme established him as absolute king.
Foreign intervention again: it is difficult for the historian
to feel moral indignation.

So in London the Spanish liberals gathered. ‘Daily in
the cold spring air, 5 wrote Carlyle, ‘under skies so unlike
their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred
stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks; per-
ambulating, mostly with closed lips’ — a grotesque vision
obtrudes of those other tragic figures who perambulated
with open mouths — ‘the broad pavements of Euston
Square and the regions about St. Pancras new church.’
Their leader was Torrijos, a soldier and diplomat, the
friend of Sterling’s parents, and soon therefore the friend
of the literary and metaphysical Apostles. In Sterling’s
rooms in Regent Street the radicals met Torrijos and
talked. Sterling was twenty-four and Tennyson twenty-
one.

The Apostles would probably have played no active
part if it had not been for Sterling’s Irish cousin, Robert

308

THE APOSTLES INTERVENE

Boyd, a young man of a hasty and adventurous temper,
who had thrown up his commission in the Army because
of a fancied insult and now, with five thousand pounds in
his pocket, planned to go privateering in the East.
Torrijos needed capital and promised Boyd the command
of a Spanish cavalry regiment on Ferdinand’s defeat.
Even without the promise the idea of conquering a king-
dom would have been enough for Boyd, whose ambition
it was to live, like Conrad's Captain Blunt, 4 by his sword \
A boat was bought in the Thames and secretly armed.
Boyd and the Apostles were to sail it down the river at
night to Deal and there take on board Torrijos and fifty
picked Spaniards. The excitement, perhaps the sudden
intrusion of reality when the arms came on board, proved
too much for Sterling. ‘Things are going on very well,
but are very, even frightfully near 5 , he wrote in February
1830, and soon his health gave way and furnished
him with an excuse to stay behind, saved him for a Bays-
water curacy, for the essays on Revelation and Sin, for
death at Ventnor. But he did not avoid all danger; the
Spanish Ambassador got wind of the preparations, the
river police were informed, and one night they appeared
over the side and seized the ship in the King’s name.
Sterling dropped into a wherry, while a policeman
brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot, escaped to
Deal and warned Torrijos. The Spaniards crossed to
France, and still accompanied by Boyd and a few of the
Apostles, made their way in small parties to Gibraltar.

Tennyson and Hallam were not with them— a Cam-
bridge term intervened. But for the long vacation they
had a part .to play, not altogether without danger. While
Torrijos waited at Gibraltar, money and dispatches had
to be carried to other insurgents in the north of Spain. So

309

SOME CHARACTERS

Tennyson and Hallam travelled across the Pyrenees by
diligence, passing Cauteretz on the way, which Tennyson
remembered thirty-two years later in a gentle poem to
the memory of his friend, and reached the rebels 5 camp.

4 A wild bustling time we had of it, 5 Hallam declared
later. T played my part as conspirator in a small way and
made friends with two or three gallant men who have
since been trying their luck with Valdes. 5 One of these was
the commander, Ojeda, who spoke to Tennyson of his
wish ‘ couper la gorge a tons les cures 5 but added with his
hand on his heart, ‘mais vous connaissez mon cceur The
two came back from the ‘ferment of minds and stir of
events 5 in the steamer Leeds from Bordeaux, and a young
girl, who was travelling with her father and sister, paid
particular attention to Hallam, ‘a very interesting delicate
looking young man 5 . He read her one of Scott’s novels,
and Tennyson listened in the background, wearing a
large conspirator’s cape and a tall hat. They did not
confide their story to her.

Soon after they reached England a report came to
Somersby Rectory that John Kemble — another of the
Apostles — had been caught in the south and was to be
tried for his life, and Tennyson in the early morning
posted to Lincoln to try to find someone acquainted with
the Consul at Cadiz, who might help to save his friend.
But the rumour was false. It anticipated a more tragic
story, for Torrijos and his band, commanded to leave
Gibraltar in November, 1831, sailed in two small vessels
for Malaga, were chased by guardships and ran ashore.
They barricaded themselves into a farmhouse, called
curiously enough Ingles, and were surrounded. It was
useless to resist and they surrendered, hoping for mercy.
But they received none. They were shot on the esplanade

310

THE APOSTLES INTERVENE

at Malaga, after being shrived by a priest. Boyd received
one favour: his body was delivered to the British Consul
for burial.

He was the only Englishman to die, for the Apostles,
tired of the long wait at Gibraltar, had already scattered
through Spain with guidebooks, examining churches
and Moorish remains. Sterling, who had his cousin’s
death on his conscience, never quite recovered from the
blow. ‘ I hear the sound of that musketry,’ he wrote in a
letter; ‘it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain.’
Haiiam took the adventure lightly: ‘After revolutionizing
kingdoms, one is still less inclined than before to trouble
one’s head about scholarships, degrees, and such gear.’
Tennyson’s silence was unbroken. He may have reflected
that only a Cambridge term had stood between him and
the firing party on Malaga esplanade.

1937

311

MR COOK’S CENTURY

Already they seem to belong to history — those tourists
of the 1830s; they have the dignity and the pathos of a
period, as they gather, the older ones in extraordinary
hats and veils, the younger a little awkward and coltish,
on the Continental platform at Victoria. Their baggage is
all labelled for the Swiss pensions , the Italian lakes : in
their handbags they carry seasick remedies and some of
them tiny bottles of brandy; their tickets are probably in
the hands of the courier, who now kindly and dexterously,
with an old-world manner, shepherds them towards the
second-class (first on boat), tow T ards adventure — the first
view of Mont Blanc, the fancy-dress dance at Grindeiwald,
the falls of Schaff hausen (seen through stained glass for a
few francs extra). How sad it is that war prevents the one-
hundredth anniversary of the first Cook’s excursion being
celebrated in a suitable atmosphere — with lots of eau-de-
Cologne and steam and shiny picture-papers, and after-
wards the smell of oil and sea-gulls and a sense of sup-
pressed ladylike excitement, and the scramble along
the corridor with the right coupons towards the first meal
on the Basle express — everything paid for in advance,
even the tips.

Of course there was so much more to Cook’s than that :
that little daily gathering on the Continental platform was
rather like the unimportant flower a big business execu-
tive may wear in his button-hole for the sake of some
early association. Thomas Cook and Son, who, in 1938,
could have arranged you an independent tour to Central
Africa as easily as to Ostend, had become a world-power
which dealt with Prime Ministers: they transported
Gordon up the Nile, and afterwards the relief expedition
— 18,000 troops, 130,000 tons of stores, and 65,000 tons

312

MR COOK’S CENTURY

of coal; they reformed the pilgrim traffic to Mecca,
deported ‘undesirables’ from South Africa during the
Boer War, bought the railway up Vesuvius, and knocked
a gap in the wails of Jerusalem to let the Kaiser in; before
the end of the nineteenth century, under the son, they
had far outstripped the dream of the first Thomas Cook,
the young wood-turner and teetotaller and Bible-reader
of Market Harborough, who on 5 July 1841, chartered a
special train to carry his local temperance association
from Leicester to Loughborough, where a meeting was
to be held in Mr Paget’s park. (The distance was twelve
miles, and the return fare is.: it could hardly be less
today.) The words of Mr John Fox Bel 1 , secretary' to the
Midland Counties Railway, have the right historic ring:
‘ I know nothing of you or your society, but you shall have
the train’, and Mr Thomas Cook was quite aware that he
was making history. ‘The whole thing came to me’, he
said, ‘by intuition and my spirit recoiled at the idea of
imitation. 5 (This refers to the shameful attempt of the
Mechanics Institute of Birmingham, who had run an
excursion on 29 June to Cheltenham and Gloucester, to
question the originality of his inspiration.) The cheers
that greeted the thirsty teetotallers as they scrambled
from their open scorching trucks, the music of the
Loughborough band, the congratulatory speeches in Mr
Paget’s park bore Mr Cook on a great wave of local pride,
inspecting hotels as he went, interviewing railroad secre-
taries, noting points of interest — the fourteenth-century
cathedral, the abbey ruin, the majestical waterfall, on out
of England into Wales — ‘From the heights of Snowdon
my thoughts took flight to Ben Lomond, and I deter-
mined to try to get to Scotland.’ And get to Scotland he
did with 350 men and women — we don’t know whether

3X3

SOME CHARACTERS

they were teetotallers, and at Glasgow the guns were
fired in their honour.

But Europe was another matter: Europe, to the Bible-
reader and teetotaller, must have presented a knotty
ethical problem, and it was not until i860, after a personal
look-round, that Mr Cook brought his excursions to the
Continent. It is easy to mock nowadays at the carefully
conducted tour, but there have been times and places
when a guide was of great comfort. c In 1 865, through many
difficulties, I got my first party to Rome and Naples, and
for several years our way was through brigand-infested
districts, where military escorts protected usd

By the end of the century — under the rule of the second
Cook — the firm had become the Cook’s we know today. I
have before me a copy of a paper called Cook's Excursion -
isty for 18 March 1899; already there were few places
in the world to which an excursion had not been arranged
— from the Tea and Coffee Rooms of Bora Bimki to the
Deansgate Temperance Hotel in Manchester. The link
with Mr Paget’s park is still there, not only in the careful
choice of hotel but in the advertisements — for Dr E. D.
Moore’s Cocoa and Milk, and the Compactum Tea
Baskets. I like to feel that this — the spring of 1899 —
marks the serene height of Mr Cook’s tours, for brigands
have ceased to trouble, and there is no suspicion that they
may one day come again. Keating’s Powder has taken the
place of the military escort; Mrs Welsley Wigg is keep-
ing c an excellent table’ in Euston Square, and a young
lady, "who last year found them perfectly efficacious’,
is cautiously recommending Roach’s Sea-Sickness
Draughts — perhaps this year won’t be so lucky ? At John
Piggott’s in Cheapside you can buy all the clothes you
need for a conducted tour: the long black Chesterfield

314

MR COOK’S CENTURY

coat, the Norfolk suit, suitable for Switzerland, and the
cap with a little button on top, the Prince Albert, the
Leinster overcoat with velvet lapels, and with them, of
course, the Gladstone bag strapped and double-strapped,
secure against the dubious chambermaid and the foreign
porter. What would they have thought — those serene men
with black moustaches, and deer-stalkers for the crossing,
if they could have seen in a vision the great familiar
station-yard, dead and deserted as it was a few months
back, without a cab, a porter or a policeman, just a notice,
‘Unexploded Bomb’, casually explaining what would
have seemed to them the end of everything : no trains for
France, no trains for Switzerland, none for Italy, and
even the clock stopped ? It is, when you come to think of
it, a rather sad centenary year.

THE EXPLORERS

The imagination has its own geography which alters
with the centuries. Each continent in turn looms up on
the horizon like a great rock carved with unintelligible
hieroglyphics and symbols catching at the unconscious:
in Shakespeare's youth it was India, Arabia, the East, and
a little later, in the days of Raleigh, Central America and
Eldorado : in the eighteenth century, Australia and the
South Seas: the nineteenth century, Africa — in particu-
lar, West Africa and the Niger. Men have always tried to
rationalize their irrational acts, but the explanations given
in prospectuses like those of the South Sea Bubble and
the African Association are as unconvincing as last night’s
supper as the cause of our fantastic dreams.

Little in history is more fantastic than the beginning of
West African exploration. There had been occasional
travellers, but the exploration of this unknown territory
six times the size of Europe, the biggest white space on
the contemporary map, began at a meeting of the very
select Saturday Club at the St Alban’s Tavern on June 9,
1788. We know the company who were present. Lord
Galloway, Lord Rawdon, General Conway, Sir Adam
Fergusson, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir William Fordyce, Mr
Pultney, Mr Beaufoy, and Mr Stuart, and even the names
of those who were absent — the Bishop of Llandaff, Lord
Carysfort, and Sir John Sinclair. The nine members (at
what stage of dinner is not recorded) decided to form
themselves into an Association for Promoting the Dis-
covery of the Interior Parts of Africa and each agreed to
subscribe five guineas a year for five years. Before the
Association had been in existence for eight weeks two
explorers had been chosen and their routes assigned, but
the subscription had already proved inadequate.

316

THE EXPLORERS

The first main object was to discover the course of the
Niger; and the motive? 'In 1783% Mr Plumb writes in
his admirable introduction to Mr Howard’s anthology,*

'America had left the Empire. For some years mer-
chants and financiers had confidently predicted her
economic collapse, but no collapse came. And as yet no
one realized that the political separation of Britain and
America did not entail disastrous economic consequences,
so that in mercantile circles the discovery of new markets
seemed an urgent problem.’

But the dream was more compelling than the motive
can explain. Think of the German who

'intended to travel as a Moslem trader. With great,
perhaps excessive, thoroughness he trained on a diet of
spiders, grasshoppers, and roots, and before sailing, in
order to leave nothing to chance, had himself circumcised.
These tribulations were suffered without reward, for the
moment he set foot in Africa he caught fever and died.’

Think too of the slender chances of survival. The
phrase 'the White Man’s Grave’ has become a music-hall
cliche to those who have never seen the litde crumbling
cemeteries of the West Coast like that on Bunce Island
in Sierra Leone river. Mungo Park in the course of his
second expedition reported: 'I am sorry to say that of
forty-five Europeans who left the Gambia in perfect
health, five only are at present alive, viz. three soldiers
(one deranged in his mind). Lieutenant Martyn, and
myself.’ Forty years later the chances were hardly better.
'On the 1 8th’ (Macgregor Laird reported)

* West African Explorers , edited by C. Howard.

317

SOME CHARACTERS

c Mr Andrew Clark, a fine young gentleman about
eighteen years of age died. . . . Poor fellow! He expired
with the utmost calmness, drinking a cup of coffee; and
his amiable and obliging disposition having endeared him
to the crew, his death threw an additional gloom of
despondency over these ill-fated men. In the afternoon
James Dunbar, one of the firemen, died. On the 19th, my
chief mate, Mr Goldie, and my sailmaker, John Brien,
followed; and on the morning of the 20th, our super-
cargo, Mr Jordan, expired. I thought at the time that
Doctor Briggs had died also; as, while he was endeavour-
ing to revive Mr Jordan, he swooned and remained in-
sensible for a long time. In the evening of the 20th, Mr
Swinton also died . .

No other part of Africa has cast so deep a spell on
Englishmen as the Coast, with the damp mists, the man-
grove swamps, the malaria, the blackwater and the yellow
fever (the only coast in the world dignified by a capital
letter and needing no qualification). Is it that the explorer
has the same creative sickness as the writer or the artist and
that to fill in the map, as to fill in the character or features
of a human being, requires the urge to surrender and
self-destruction ? — you cannot even surrender yourself so
completely to a book or a picture as you can to the chances
of death. Mary Kingsley was well aware of this suicidal
streak that drove her to the Coast. In a letter to a friend
she wrote quite frankly, "Dead tired and feeling no one
had need of me any more, when my father and mother
died within six weeks of each other in ’92, and my brother
went off to the East, I went down to West Africa to die * ;
and in the sedate poetic prose of Mungo Park — the great-
est of all writers on Africa — one can detect the same

THE EXPLORERS

desire to lose himself for ever. The almost incredible
privations and dangers of his first journey among the
‘fanatic Moors’ left him with life still on his hands and
he had to return to Africa, giving up his quiet practice as
a doctor in Peebles, to lose it — no one knows exactly
where. (A Chief near Busa is said to wear his ring to
this day.) ‘When the human mind’* he had written,
‘has for some time been fluctuating between hope and
despair, tortured with anxiety, and hurried from one
extreme to another, it affords a sort of gloomy relief to
know the worst that can possibly happen. . . Again
and again in Park’s narrative the prose quickens with that
gloomy relief as his fingers touched the rock bottom of
experience.

It is right that Mungo Park should be the best
represented of all the explorers in Mr Howard’s excellent
anthology. He was a bom writer — the others, with the
exception of Burton, became good writers only because
of the interest and oddity of their material. Burton here
is very much the Burton of the Arabian Nights with his
range of intricate experience: his eye for the bizarre
concrete detail, like the golden crucifix dangling from the
neck of a Dahomey official, ‘but the crucifix is strangely
altered, the crucified being a chameleon, the venerable
emblem of the rainbow God’ : his wicked common sense
about the Amazons of Dahomey — ‘wherever a she-
soldiery is, celibacy must be one of its rules, or the troops
will be in a state of chronic functional disorder between
the ages of fifteen and thirty-five’ : his malevolent toler-
ance — ‘Human sacrifice in Dahomey is founded upon a
purely religious basis, which not only strengthens but
perpetuates the custom. It is a touching instance of the
King’s filial piety.’ What a strange encounter it would

319

SOME CHARACTERS

have been in those days for a chance voyager to South
Africa to call in passing on Her Majesty’s Consul in
Fernando Po.

There has been one deplorable change as the years
passed — the growth of British superiority. To Mungo
Park an African king deserved the same respect as his
own. ‘The king graciously replied’, ‘The good old king’,
such phrases are scattered through his work, and because
he respected African sovereignty he respected the Afri-
can, king or slave. There is a sense all the time of Christian
equality. The Moors are cruel — they are not savages.

It is with the not very likeable — and I feel not very
reliable — Major Dixon Denham in the 1820s that the
white sneer can be observed for the first time. ‘Nothing’,
he wrote, ‘could be more absurd and grotesque than
some, nay all, of the figures who formed this court’,
though one believes that the sight of Major Denham
naked and begging for a pair of trousers makes a higher
claim to absurdity if we really believe in the episode. (I
write if, for Major Denham’s story frequently seems to
echo hollowly not only the mood but the incidents of
Mungo Park’s narrative.)

Even the more likeable Macgregor Laird displays the
white pride — ‘Among other annoyances, they thrust a
disgusting Albino close to me, and asked if he was my
brother’; and with Captain Trotter’s expedition up the
Niger in the 1840s the tone has dismally darkened.
‘Captain Trotter, Senior Commissioner, explained that
Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain . . . repugnant
to the laws of God . . . Her benevolent intentions for the
benefit of Africa. . . and so on and so on.

We are not very far now from filibustering Stanley : the
hundred lashes to a carrier, the chained and padlocked

320

THE EXPLORERS

chiefs* the strong body of men armed with Remingtons,

4 the withering fire 5 , 4 the Winchesters were worked hand-
somely 5 . The dream has vanished. The stores are landed,
the trade posts established; civilization is on the way, the
Anglican missionaries will build their fake Norman
churches of laterite blocks, and as malaria and yellow
fever are defeated, the wives will follow their Rugbeian
husbands to hill stations and help them to administer the
equal justice of a good public school. Even the savagery
of Stanley had something of Africa still about it, more
than the playing fields of Bo or the art classes of Achi-
mota. We have much to be proud of in West Africa, of
the indirect rule established by Lugard, of our protection
— unknown to the same extent in East Africa — of the
native, but the Christian equality which enabled Park to
accept with humility the rebuke of a slave has vanished
for ever.

1952

21 — C.E.G.G.

321

‘SORE BONES; MUCH HEADACHE*

It is a sad thing about small nationalities that like a
possessive woman they trap their great men: Walter
Scot t, Stevenson* Bums* Livingstone — all have to some
extent been made over by their countrymen* they have
not been allowed to grow or to diminish with time. How
can they even shift in the grave under the weight of their
national memorials ? a whole industry of trinkets and
souvenirs and statuettes depends on the conformity of
the dead. A Civil Service of curators* secretaries* and
guides takes charge of the memory. (65*000 people pass
annually through the turnstiles of the Livingstone Memo-
rial House at Blantyre with its coloured statuary and its
Ancestry Room* Youth Room* Adventure Room.) An
explorer can suffer from his legend as much as a writer —
the explorer* too* has a passion to create* and just as a
body carried to its grave at the summit of a Samoan hill
obscures the writer struggling with the character of
Hermiston, so the last trek of Livingstone’s faithful
carriers to the coast* with the obvious drama and the
missionary moral* has intruded between us and the
patience* the monotony* and the weariness incurred in
adding a new line to a map* surveying an uncharted
range* correcting an erroneous reading* above all it has
obscured Livingstone’s failure — you will not find photo-
graphs of the Lari massacre at Blantyre. (Dr Macnair
does not help us to escape the legend by writing always
in capital letters of the Explorer* the Traveller* the Mis-
sionary. I prefer the admirably clear and sensible geo-
graphical notes by Dr Ronald Miller.*)

The virtue of this selection from Livingstone’s travel
books and journals is its dullness — the reader must dig
* Livingstone's Travels 3 edited by Dr James I. Macnair.

322

‘sore bones; much headache’

himself for the vivid fact or the revealing sentence.
Livingstone was not primarily concerned with the beauty
of the scenery or the drama of his journeys ; he was con-
cerned, at the beginning, with the location of healthy
mission stations, later with discovering trade routes
(which he considered might help towards the extinction
of slavery) — the discoveries of Lake Shira and Lake
Nyasa had no drama for him: they were incidental.

‘We discovered Lake Nyasa a little before noon on
September 1 6, 1859. Its southern end is 14 0 minutes 25'
South lat., 35 0 30' E. long. At this point the valley is
about 12 miles wide. There are hills on both sides of the
lake.’

The plot of the novel catches the attention, but the sub-
ject lies deeper. ‘The Nile sources are valuable only to me
as a means of opening my mouth with power.’

Literary expression was not Livingstone’s object — a
compass reading was more important for his mission.
(‘It seems a pity that the important facts about two
healthy ridges should not be known to Christendom.’)
But in the early years when he wrote for publication,
Missionary Travels and Researches , The Zambesi and Its
Tributaries , he thought it necessary to take as his model
the work of other Victorian travel books.

‘We proceeded rapidly up-river. The magnificent
stream is often more than a mile broad and is adorned by
many islands from three to five miles in length. The
beauty of the scenery on some of these islands is greatly
increased by the date-palm with its gracefully curved
fronds and refreshing light-green colour, while the lofty

323

SOME CHARACTERS

palmyra towers above and casts its feathery foliage
against a cloudless sky. The banks of the river are equally
covered by forest and most of the trees on the brink of the
water send down roots from their branches, like the
banian. The adjacent country is rocky and undulating,
abounding in elephants and all other large game, except
leches and nakongs, which seem generally to avoid stony
ground . 5

The airs and graces were to be shed when he was no
longer concerned in advancing the sales of his books at
home and increasing his opportunities for work. In the
final journals we get the hard truthful writing of which he
was capable. Written for no one but himself during that
terrible seven-year journey, they present a picture quite
different to those bas-reliefs of a missionary in a peaked
consular cap, Bible in hand, surrounded by his native
followers. Tired out, disillusioned (for now he was
dependent upon the very slave traders whom he wished
to put out of business for ever), uncertain of everything
(even of the Zambesi whose navigability had been his
obstinate dream) except of his simple evangelical faith,
so free from the complex dogmas of a theologian — just
God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.
(The Apostles 5 Creed was nearer to him than the Athana-
sian.)

How little experience is needed in a reader to make him
realize the appalling nature of the seven-year journey.
This writer has experienced only four weeks of African
travel on foot, one strike of carriers, one bad Chief, a
single night of high fever, only a few days when provisions
grew short — but multiplying that small experience nearly
a hundred times in days and how many hundred times

324

‘sore bones; much headache 9

in privation, it seems almost incredible that Livingstone
could have gone on for so long without returning to
civilization. Dr Miller admirably describes the condition
of all African travel — the spider-web of tracks that may
lead somewhere or nowhere:

‘One of the amazing features of Africa is the close net-
work of footpaths that exists everywhere — and leads
everywhere — highly convenient for movement within a
limited neighbourhood, but most confusing for the
stranger wishing to make a long cross-country traverse;
and placing him at the mercy of guides who may mislead
him, deliberately or accidentally, or simply immobilise
him by withdrawing their services. . . . Thus we find
Livingstone, like many other African travellers, sub-
jected to expensive and infuriating delays by the refusal
of chiefs to supply guides. He navigated and fixed the
framework of his maps by means of sextant observations,
of course, but these could not tell him which fork of the
path led merely to an outfield, and which to the next
village on his route; which to a swamp and which to the
ford on the river. 9

Here are a few jottings of his journey.

Christmas Day 1866. ‘A little indigestible porridge, of
hardly any taste, is now my fare and it makes me dream of
better. 9

January, 1867 (the great journey was not yet a year old).
Deserting carriers stole:

‘all the dishes, a large box of powder, the flour we had
purchased dearly to help us as far as the Chambesi, the

325

SOME CHARACTERS

tools, two guns and a cartridge pouch; but the medicine
chest was the sorest loss of all. I felt as if I had received
a sentence of death, like poor Bishop Mackenzie. 5

October, 1867. "Sore bones; much headache; no
appetite; much thirst. 5

December, 1867. 6 1 am so tired of exploration . . . 5

July, 1868. ‘Here we cooked a little porridge, and then
I lay down on one side, and the canoe men and my
attendants at the fire in the middle. I was soon asleep and
dreamt I had apartments in Mivart’s hotel. 5

5th July, 1872. (Stanley by this time had come and
gone.) ‘Weary ! Weary ! 5 — but there were still ten months
to go.

All the last months of the seven years 5 trek were spent
in a flat prairie waste of water; the earth, what there was
of it, was like adhesive plaster. In one night six inches of
rain fell. Canoes sank and stuck; tents became rotten,
clothes were never dry. There are moments when the
reader feels as though Livingstone had forgotten his true
purpose, which was not to explore the limit of human
endurance but to reach the Lualaba river and sail down
it in the hope that it might lead him to the Nile and its
sources (even that was only a means to the great white
trade routes, the blessings as he believed of commerce,
the end of slavery). He was in Childe Roland 5 s territory
now— ‘a lion wandered into this world of water and ant-
hills and roared night and morning 5 . What a long way he
had come from the gracefully curved fronds, the magnifi-

326

"sore bones; much headache’

cent streams* the lofty palmyra towers. Like Stevenson
struggling with Weir he had reached rock at the moment
of death.

The comparison between these two Scotsmen is oddly
close. Under the literary polish of the Vailima Prayers
was a simplicity of faith very similar to Livingstone’s.
Does it come from a Scottish upbringing — this ability to
feel regret without remorse, to pardon oneself and accept
one’s weakness, the ability to leave oneself to God ? ‘For
our sins forgiven or prevented, for our shame unpub-
lished, we bless and thank Thee, O God.’ Thus Steven-
son, and thus Livingstone:

‘We now end 1866. It has not been so fruitful or useful
as I intended. Will try to do better in 1 867, and be better —
more gentle and loving. And may the Almighty, to whom
I commit my way, bring my desires to pass, and prosper
me. Let all the sins of ’66 be blotted out for Jesus’ sake.’

At the end they shared the same sense of failure. Who
suffered more ? Stevenson two months before his death
writing, T am a fictitious article and have long known it.
I am read by journalists, by my fellow novelists, and by
boys’, or Livingstone finding himself embroiled in the
slave trade he hated : T am heart sore and sick of human
blood. ... I doubt whether the divine favour and will is
on my side.’

For the end their wish was the same. It is impossible
not to recall the grave on Mount Vaea and the over-
familiar verses, ‘Here he lies where he longed to be’,
when we read in Livingstone’s journal on June 25, 1868 :

‘We came to a grave in the forest. It was a litde
327

SOME CHARACTERS

rounded mound, as if the occupant sat in it. It was
strewn over with flour, and a number of large beads had
been put on it. A little path showed that it had visitors.
That is the sort of grave I should prefer. To lie in the
still, still forest, with no hand ever to disturb my bones.
Graves at home seem to me miserable and without
elbow room, especially those in cold, damp clay.’

Stevenson’s wishes were the more respected, for
Livingstone’s embalmed body was brought home to the
damp clay and the lack of elbow room in the nave of
Westminster Abbey.

Less than a hundred years have gone by since Living-
stone’s death and we can see the measure of his failure in
East Africa today. The trade routes have been opened up,
the slave trade abolished, but the true lesson of Living-
stone’s life was completely forgotten. ‘In attempting
their moral elevation’, Livingstone wrote of the Africans,
‘it is always more conductive to the end desired that the
teacher should come unaccompanied by any power to
cause either jealousy or fear.’ In the same book he wrote,
‘Good manners are as necessary among barbarians as
among the civilized but during those weeks in Stanley’s
company he had failed to influence his companion except
superficially. It was to Stanley and his Maxim guns and
rawhide whips that the future in East Africa belonged,
and it was Stanley’s methods that left a legacy of hatred
and distrust throughout Africa.

1954

328

FRANCIS PARKMAN

'My 23rd Birthday. Nooned at a mud puddle/ So Park-
man noted in his journal* in 1846, and we shall look far
for any comparable passage in the diaries of a creative
artist. Certainly the wind has never played quite so freely
at a historian’s birth. The smell of documents, the hard
feel of the desk-chair, are singularly absent. Parkman had
already ridden for three weeks on the arduous and
dangerous Oregon trail, and in an earlier passage, a week
or two back, he had let his imagination dwell on that vast
range of experience already crossed between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-two.

‘Shaw and Henry went off for buffaloes. H. killed two
bulls. The Capt. very nervous and old-womanish at noon-
ing — he did not like the look of the hills, which were at
least half a mile off— there might be Inds. there, ready to
pounce on the horses. In the afternoon, rode among the
hills — plenty of antelope — lay on the barren ridge of one
of them, and contrasted my present situation with my
situation in the convent at Rome/

Surely no other historian has planned his life work so
young nor learned to write so hard a way. At the age of
eighteen the whole scheme of his great work France and
England in North America had captured his consciousness ;
there remained only to gather his material and to begin.
One remembers the immense importance that Gibbon’s
biographers have attributed to his gentlemanly service in
the Hampshire Militia, but what are we to think of a
young historian who, before starting to write his first

* The Journals of Francis Parkman, edited by Mason Wade.

329

SOME CHARACTERS

volume* The Conspiracy of Pontiac * finds it necessary to
make the long journey to Europe and Rome* there to
stay in a Passionist monastery so that he may attain some
imaginative sympathy with the Catholic missionaries who
are the heroes of his second volume (published twenty-
four years later) and after that to undertake his journey
along the Oregon trail in quest of Indian lore* thus ruin-
ing his health for a lifetime in the mere gathering of back-
ground material ?

Parkman was an uncertain stylist (as the admirable
editor of these journals writes : 4 There seems to have been
a natural instinct for the phrase that is just a shade too
high, just as his ear was naturally faulty 5 )* but his errors
of taste are carried away by the great drive of his narrative*
much as they are in the case of Motley and in our own day
Mr Churchill. He had ridden off through the dangerous
wilderness with a single companion* like one of the heroes
of his epic or a character in Fenimore Cooper* who had
woken his genius* he had eaten dog with the Indians and
stayed in their moving villages* he had watched the tribes
gather for war and heard the news of traders 5 deaths
brought in. He had listened to Big Crow’s own account
of his savagery — 4 he has killed 14 men; and dwells with
great satisfaction on the capture of a Utah* whom he took
personally; and* with the other Sioux* scalped alive* cut
the tendons of his wrist* and flung* still alive* into a great
fire. 5 Since the seventeenth century no historian had so
lived and suffered for his art. Like Prescott he all but lost
his sight* so that he was forced to use a wire grid to guide
his pencil* he suffered from misanthropy and a melan-
cholia that snaps out like a dog even from his early journals
( c the little contemptible faces — the thin* weak tottering
figures — that one meets here on Broadway* are disgusting.

330

FRANCIS PARKMAN

One feels savage with human nature 5 ). The work planned
at eighteen, begun at twenty-eight, was only finished at
fifty-nine, in the year before his death, by working against
time and his own health. This was a poet’s vocation,
followed with a desperate intensity careless of conse-
quences, and the journals are as important in tracing the
course of the creative impulse as the journals of Henry
James. And how closely we are reminded of the James
family and their strange melancholia when we read in one
of Parkman’s letters :

£ Between 1852 and i860 this cerebral rebellion passed
through great and seemingly capricious fluctuations. It
had its ebbs and floods. Slight and sometimes imper-
ceptible causes would produce an access which some-
times lasted with little respite for months. When it was in
its milder moods, I used the opportunity to collect
material and prepare ground for the future work, should
work ever become practicable. When it was at its
worst, the condition was not enviable. I could neither
listen to reading nor engage in conversation even of the
lightest. Sleep was difficult, and was often banished
entirely for one or two nights during which the brain was
apt to be in a state of abnormal activity which had to be
repressed at any cost, since thought produced the in-
tens est torture. The effort required to keep the irritated
organ quiet was so fatiguing that I occasionally rose and
spent hours in the open air, where I found distraction and
relief watching the policemen and the tramps on the Malls
of Boston Common, at the risk of passing for a tramp my-
self. Towards the end of the night this cerebral excitation
would seem to tire itself out, and give place to a condition
of weight and oppression much easier to bear/

331

SOME CHARACTERS

Mr Mason Wade is an impeccable editor, sensitive to
the qualities of Parkman’s style, its merits as well as its
demerits, learned in his subject, passionately industrious
in tracing the most transient character. His notes are often
as fascinating as the text — on ‘Old Dick’ for example, an
odd job man on Lake George, who collected rattlesnakes
and exhibited them in a box inscribed: ‘In this box a
Rattel Snaick Hoo was Kecht on Black mountaing. He is
seven years old last July. Admittance sixpence site. Child-
ren half price, or notten,’ or on that strange character,
Joseph Brant, alias Thayendanegea, Mohawk chief and
freemason, who on one occasion saved from the stake a
fellow mason who gave him the right sign. Brant was
entertained by Boswell and painted by Romney. What a
long way such a character seems from the murderers of
the Jesuit Brebeuf (they baptized him with boiling water,
cut strips of flesh from his living body and ate them,
and opened his breast and drank his blood before he
died).

Mr Wade himself discovered these journals, with the
romantic and paradoxical simplicity of a Chesterton
detective story, in Parkman’s old Boston home on Chest-
nut Street.

‘Parkman’s Indian trophies still hung on the walls ; the
bookcases still held the well-worn editions of Byron,
Cooper, and Scott which were his life-long favourites;
and in the centre of the room, covered with a dust sheet,
stood the desk on which the great histories had been
written. This desk was two-sided; the drawers on one
side had obviously been inspected and emptied of most
of their contents . . . the drawers on the other side had
been overlooked ; they contained the missing journals and

332

FRANCIS PARKMAN

a great mass of correspondence, including some of the
most important letters Parkman wrote and received.’

For the general reader the most interesting of Mr
Wade’s discoveries is Parkman’s journal of the Oregon
Trail which Mr Wade rightly prefers to the work based
on it — Parkman’s first and most popular book, popular
because of the way in which it was adulterated to suit the
fashion of the time by his friend Charles Eliot Norton,
‘ carefully bowdlerized of much anthropological data and
many insights into Western life which seemed too crude
to his delicate taste’. Mr Wade quotes several examples
of these changes from the vivid fluid journal to the stilted
literary tones — the false Cooperisms — of the book. These
Cooperisms, still evident in The Conspiracy of Pontiac >
Parkman gradually shed. Life and literature at the begin-
ning lay uneasily with a sword between them, so that
nothing in the early books has the same sense of indivi-
dual speech and character that we find in the journals.
Here from the journals is a certain Mr Smith of Palermo :

‘ “ Don’t tell me about your Tarpeian rock. I’ve seen it,
and what’s more, the feller wanted I should give him half
a dollar for taking me there. ‘Now look here!’ says I,
‘do you s’pose I’m going to pay you for showing me this
old pile of stones ? I can see better rocks than this any
day, for nothing ; so clear out ! ’ I’ll tell you the way I do, ”
continued Mr Smith, “I don’t go and look and stare as
some people do when I get inside of a church, but I pace
off the length and breadth, and then set it down on paper.
Then, you see. I’ve got something that will keep!”’

And here is an old soldier near the Canadian Border:

333

SOME CHARACTERS

‘On entering the bar-room* an old man with a sun-
burnt wrinkled face and no teeth* a little straw hat set on
one side of his grey head — and who was sitting on a chair
leaning his elbows on his knees and straddling his legs
apart — thus addressed me: “Hullo! hullo! What’s agoin’
on* now ? Ye ain’t off to the wars already* be ye ? Ther’
ain’t no war now as I knows on* though there’s agoin’ to
be one afore long* as damned bloody as ever was fit this
side o’ hell! ”... He then began to speak of some of his
neighbours* one of whom he mentioned as “that G — d
damnedest* sneakingest* nastiest puppy that ever went
this side of hell! ” Another he likened to a “sheep’s cod
dried”; another was “not fit to carry guts to a bear”.’

Only with his third book — The Jesuits in North
America — did the marriage satisfactorily take place. In
the deeply moving Relations of the Jesuits that form the
greater part of his material he found again the power of
characteristic speech: like that of the tortured priest
Bressani who wrote with bitter humour to his Superior* * I
could not have believed that a man was so hard to kill and
in another letter of ironic apology to the Jesuit General in
safe Rome : c I don’t know if your Paternity will recognize
the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well.
The letter is soiled and ill-written ; because the writer had
only one finger of his right hand left entire* and cannot
prevent the blood from his wounds* which are still open*
from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed
with water and his table is the earth.’

By this time* too* Parkman had learned the value of
bald narrative:

‘Noel Chabanel came later to the mission; for he did
334

FRANCIS PARKMAN

not reach the Huron country until 1643. He detested the
Indian life — the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the
impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky
lodge-fire, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws,
with their dogs, and their restless, screeching children.
He had a natural inaptitude to learning the language, and
laboured at it for five years with scarcely a sign of pro-
gress. The Devil whispered a suggestion into his ear: Let
him procure his release from these barren and revolting
toils, and return to France, where congenial and useful
employments awaited him. Chabanel refused to listen;
and when the temptation still beset him he bound him-
self by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of
his death.’

And to complete the marriage Parkman had learned to
control on occasion his poetic prose with fine effect as in
this picture of Indian immortality:

c In the general belief, however, there was but one land
of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as
they had been in life, wended their way through dark
forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and
rotten wood. On arriving they sat all day in the crouching
posture of the sick, and when night came, hunted the
shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows,
among the shades of trees and rocks ; for all things, anim-
ate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed
together to the gloomy country of the dead. 5

The last notebook Parkman kept contains an account
of his desperate final battle against insomnia — the amount
of sleeping draught, the hours of sleep gained. One

335

SOME CHARACTERS

column* A Half-Century of Conflict , had to be finished
and raised in its place to complete the great architectural
scheme. The hours of sleeping dropped as low as three
and a half and only once in the three-year record rose
above eight. In that bare mathematical catalogue there is
something of the spirit of Chabanel. The historian had
made his vow forty years before and it was kept.

DON IN MEXICO

This is an account by a Cambridge professor of two
trips to the tourist resorts of Mexico,* but it pretends to
be rather more. The professor is a Spanish scholar — and
that should have been an advantage; but he was handi-
capped by the unenterprising nature of his journey (the
usual round-trip by way of Mexico City, Taxco, Cuerna-
vaca, Puebla, Vera Cruz, Merida, Chichen-Itza), by his
friendships with Spanish Republicans as strange to the
country as himself, by his ignorance of and antipathy to
the religion of the country, and by a whimsical prose
style less successful in conveying the atmosphere of
Mexico than that of Cambridge-jokes on the Trumping-
ton Road, charades with undergraduates in red-brick
villas, bicycles in the hall. His book is self-illustrated
with little dark holiday snaps called ‘Puebla: Tiled
House’, or ‘Mexico: Aztec Calendar Stone’, and like
letters home his account is either very personal or else
very guide-book at second-hand: ‘The remains at
Chichen-Itza lie in three groups. Those so far described
belong to North Chichen; the others are referred to as
Middle Chichen and Old Chichen. Following the trail
from North Chichen to Middle Chichen, the first build-
ing one comes to . . and so on. But one can go to more
accurate and comprehensive guide-books, and it is for
the portrait of the Cambridge don abroad that this book
will be read by the irreverent: the self-portrait of a
middle-aged professor, one of ‘ the cultured and civilized’,
with a liking for weak tea and ‘amusing conversation’ on
‘the plane of ripe but frivolous scholarship ’ — the author-
ship of The Young Visiters , for example.

* Mexico: A New Spain With Old Friends , by Professor J. B.
Trend.

22 — C.E.G.G.

337

SOME CHARACTERS

In spite of the unconscious humour of many of the
scenes, the book would not be worth attention if it were
not symptomatic — symptomatic of the inhumanity of the
academic brain, and its unreliability. Professor Trend,
touring round the beauty spots, saw no sign of religious
persecution. He noticed, it is true, a few religious colleges
turned into libraries, but that to the nineteenth-century
progressive mind was all to the good; apparently he did
not notice in Mexico City the garages and cinemas that
had once been churches. Anyway, there were plenty with-
out these — "Mexico, like Spain, somewhat overbuilt
itself in the way of churches.’ A church to the professor
was an "interior 5 , a style of architecture: he was appalled
in Puebla at "the religiosity of the place 5 ; "tracts thrust
into your hands, individuals standing at the church doors
to take a collection even before you could look in to see
whether the interior was worth looking at 5 . (One is
reminded of the Mr Smith whom Parkman encountered
at Palermo.)

It would be funny — the whimsicality, the self-import-
ance, the ignorance — if it were not so heartless. However
strong the detestation of the Cambridge don for the
Roman Catholic Faith, he might have remembered that
those who held it were human. Shoot them and they
bleed as copiously as a Republican. Starve them . . . He
may have observed in Mexico City the number of priests
exercising their religious duties ; he made no inquiries, or
he would have learnt that in Mexico City, as in other
tourist centres, the law is winked at, so that priests who
are forbidden to say Mass in their own States and are,
therefore, without means, flock to the capital to escape
starvation. The professor visited Orizaba in 1939: the
churches were certainly open. He did not ask the reason

338

[ 3 ]

SAMUEL BUTLER

One knows the man well in his suit of scrubby black, his
stained greenish felt, with his umbrella, his boots, the
odour of tobacco on his clothes : he leans over the book-
stall fingering the ugly cheap reprints of the Rationalist
Press or remains for a long while absorbed by the Kensit
literature in a small dingy shop near St Paul’s. Greeting
him one is embarrassed by his inability to tell polite un-
truths. "Good morning.’ "The morning is nothing of the
kind.’ He will not stoop to the medieval superstition of
"Good-bye’. He is an Honest Man and rather conscious
of the fact, but he has gained little stature from his
emancipation. One is instinctively aware in his past of an
ugly, crippling childhood, attics and blackbeetles, and
some grim grammar school, and sadistic masters. His
favourite author is Samuel Butler, and one remembers
Butler’s idea of immortality, the desiccated sentiment of:

Yet meet we shall , and party and meet again ,

Where dead men meet , on lips of living men .

Here, in the dry deformed aggressive spirit, is Samuel
Butler’s life everlasting. Few others will be found to
swallow whole The Fair Haven and Life and Habit y
Evolution Old and New and God the Known and God the
Unknown , or even the note-books, of which this second
selection has just appeared.* Out of the nineteen volumes
of the collected works most people pick and choose, read
The Way of All Flesh for the savour of hatred, Erewhon
for the brilliant reporting of the opening chapters. But

* Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler , chosen
and edited by A. T. Bartholomew.

340

SAMUEL BUTLER

this would never have satisfied Butler who wanted to stuff
himself neck and crop between the teeth of time.

These note-books witness it. He never overtly made
clear quite why he copied and re-copied these random
jottings into the carefully bound, dismally designed
volumes ‘in half black roan, with dark green pin-head
cloth sides and shiny marbled end-papers 5 ; it was not
primarily as material for his books — ‘I greatly question
the use of making the notes at all. I find I next to never
refer to them or use them 5 ; if we are to believe him, ‘they
are not meant for publication 5 , though a few lines later
he writes, ‘Many a one of those who look over this book
— for that it will be looked over by not a few I doubt not
— will think me to have been a greater fool than I pro-
bably was 5 , but the motive is really obvious enough.
These notes were to present to posterity the whole man
in his wisdom, his wit, his hate, and even his triviality.
There is something rather tryingly ‘rough diamond 5
about the approach — ‘You must take me just as you find
me 5 — but alas, one finds him in these notes deep buried
under the late Victorian rational dust. One digs and digs
and is occasionally rewarded by the genuine gold glitter
of a cuff-link.

The trouble is, he was not an artist. He remarks in one
of the notes, ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the
smallest pains with his style and was at the same time
readable . 5 To have thought twice about the words he
used, to have tried to refine his language in order to
express his meaning with greater exactitude, this would
have been, in his view, to blaspheme against the essential
Samuel (‘You must take me just as you find me 5 ). Better
far to stick down everything as it came to mind, even when
the note was as trivial as :

341

SOME CHARACTERS

THE RIDICULOUS AND THE SUBLIME

‘As there is but one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous, so also there is but one from the ridiculous
to the sublime’;

as cheaply smart as:

CHRIST

‘Jesus! with all thy faults I love thee still 5 ;
as meaningless as :

EVERYTHING

‘should be taken seriously, and nothing should be
taken seriously . 5

There is a great deal of this kind of thing in the second
selection from the note-books : a great many exhibitions
of rather cocky conceit in his own smartness — c So and so
said to me ... I said to him , 5 the smartness which makes
Erewhon so insignificant beside Gulliver , many super-
ficial half-truths in the form of paradoxes which have
become aggravatingly familiar in the plays of his disciple;
and always, in whatever subject he treats, the soreness of
the unhealing wound. The perpetual need to generalize
from a peculiar personal experience maimed his imagina-
tion. Even Christianity he could not consider dispas-
sionately because it was the history of a Father and Son. In
The Way of All Flesh he avenged a little of his childhood’s
suffering, but he was not freed from the dead hand. His
most serious criticism has the pettiness of personal hate,
and how will posterity be able to take with respect attacks
on Authority (whether it be the authority of God, Trinity
College, or Darwin) when the mask it wears is always the
cruel, smug, unimportant features of Theobald Pontifex ?

1934

342

THE UGLY ACT

The wide and indiscriminating territory of literature,
with all its range of human authorship surely contains
few figures less agreeable than W. E. Henley. His reputa-
tion would hardly have survived into a centenary year
on the strength of such poems as Out of the Night with
its bombast and muddled thought (although Mr
Connell* finds them in all ‘ respectable anthologies ’
— odd epithet), and the fame of an editor must always
be short lived. Only a biographer has time to look
through the files of a dead review, listing the faded names
of contributors that once, vivid with promise, seemed to
cast a lustre over their leader — David Hannay, G. S.
Street, Katherine Tynan, Marriott Watson, T. E. Brown,
and the like. And yet, in some strange way, this ill-
tempered cripple does still live in literary history: we
cannot quite forget him; he glares out at us from the
shadows of the last century, breathing heavily through
his big beard, his fist ready like Long John Silver with
his crutch, arousing our attention by the venom of his
quarrels, by his ignobility and violence and the long-
drawn-out malignity of his character, that elephantine
quality which ensured his never forgetting what he con-
sidered an injury, although he was always ready to extend
the warm hearty palm of forgiveness to a victim when the
injury had been inflicted by himself.

The most famous of his quarrels was, of course, that
with Stevenson, and the most long lived, for Henley
nursed his memory of it nearly twenty years before at last
he had his say about his dead friend in the famous Pall
Mall Magazine review of Graham Balfour’s biography.

* W. E. Henley, by John Connell.

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SOME CHARACTERS

Of that review Henry James wrote, in a letter that Mr
Connell might have quoted if he had taken a more im-
partial view of Henley:

‘It’s really a rather striking and lurid — and so far
interesting case — of long discomfortable jealousy and
ranklement turned at last to post-humous (as it were!)
malignity, and making the man do, coram publico , his
ugly act, risking the dishonour for the assuagement . . .
the whole business illustrates how life takes upon itself
to give us more true and consistent examples of human
unpleasantness than expectation could suggest — makes
a given man, I mean, live up to his ugliness.’

Mr Connell, however, one must admit, is impartial
enough for us to see Henley living up to his ugliness in a
yet more extreme form. Wilde, unaffected by the attacks
on Dorian Gray that had appeared under Henley’s
editorship, had written to him on the death of his
daughter a letter of gentle and perceptive sympathy.

‘I am very sorry indeed to hear of your great loss — I
hope you will let me come down quietly to you one even-
ing and over our cigarettes we will talk of the bitter ways
of fortune, and the hard ways of life. But, my dear Henley,
to work — to work — that is your duty — that is what re-
mains for natures like ours. Work never seems to me a
reality, but as a way of getting rid of reality.’

It is hard to uncover the source of Henley’s rage against
Wilde. Perhaps Wilde’s very generosity — a quality in
which Henley was deficient — called it out, in the same
way that the money Henley regularly received from

344

THE UGLY ACT

Stevenson, even after their friendship had ceased, made
it all the more necessary for him to assert, however
viciously, his independence. Perhaps it was simply the
jealousy of a bad writer for his superior who had replied
with such impervious wit and good humour to his critics
in the National Observer . Wilde was not vulnerable to
journalistic attack, and Henley seems to have felt a
shabby delight at the thought that at least he was vulner-
able to the law. And so again we have the sight of Henley
exposing himself far more drastically than he exposed his
victim in those ugly letters in which he kept Whibley in
Paris posted on the news of the two trials.

"Oscar at Bay was on the whole a pleasing sight . . .
Holloway and Bow Street have taken his hair out of curl
in more senses than one. And I am pretty sure that he is
having a dam bad time . . .

"As for Hosker, the news is that he lives with his
brother, and is all day steeping, steeping himself in
liquor, and moaning for Boasy! I am summoned to play
the juryman next Monday (je rrfen fiche pas maV) y and it
isn't impossible that I should have at least the occasion of
sitting upon him. For, they say, he has lost all nerve, all
pose, all everything; and is just now so much the
Ordinary Drunkard that he has not even the energy to
kill himself,’

The depressing nature of the hero is emphasized by a
certain drabness in his biographer. This is never at its
best a well-written book, and Mr Connell shows little
power of discrimination in his choice of material. The
letters to Whibley are, for the most part, incredibly
tedious — repeated complaints of overdue articles, news

345

SOME CHARACTERS

of his own books, bluff out-dated slang. Here is one
typical paragraph to stand for hundreds: 'The book
seems to be thriving no end. Nutt had ordered all the
edition from the binder: and therewith the remainder of
Ed. Sec. of A,B, of V, So the oofbird may presently
begin to flutter.’

1949

346

ERIC GILL

Roman Catholicism in this country has been a
great breeder of eccentrics — one cannot picture a man
like Charles Waterton belonging to any other faith, and
most of us treasure the memory of some strong individu-
ality who combined a strict private integrity with a care-
fully arranged disregard of conformity to national ways
of thought and behaviour. Eric Gill, with his beard and
his biretta, his enormous outspokenness, his amorous
gusto, tr ailing his family across the breadth of England
with his chickens, cats, dogs, goats, ducks, and geese,
belonged only distantly to this untraditional tradition;
he was an intruder — a disturbing intruder among the
eccentrics. He had not behind him the baroque inter-
nationalism of a great Catholic school, or the little prim-
nesses of a convent childhood, to separate him from his
fellow-countrymen along well-prepared lines, with the
help of scraps of bizarre worldliness or the tag-end of
peasant beliefs picked up in saints’ lives.

Gill’s father was a curate in the Countess of Hunting-
don’s Connexion in Brighton, who later conformed to the
Anglican Church and became a different sort of curate
in Chichester, doomed to bring up eleven children on
£150 a year. ‘He was from a “highbrow”, intellectual,
agnostic point of view, a complete nonentity; but he
loved the Lord His God with all his sentimental mind
and all his sentimental soul.’ What Gill gained from his
parents was a sense of vocation; money was never the
standard by which values were gauged. ‘They never com-
plained about poverty as though it was an injustice. And
they never put the pursuit of riches before us as an
occupation worthy of good people.’ There were
tradesmen in the family, and missionaries in the

347

SOME CHARACTERS

South Seas. There was even in a sense art, for Gill’s
mother had been a singer in an opera company and his
father read Kingsley and Carlyle and Tennyson’s poems,
and called his son after Dean Farrar’s hero. It was all
kindling-wood waiting for a fire — the grim Brighton
railway viaduct with the huddled mean houses of Preston
Park inserted between the railway lines, the small boy
drawing engines and the father writing sermons, and the
advertising sign of a machine-made bread against the
sky, and a Mrs Hart whispering dreadfully, c There was
a black-beetle in it ’ — and yet a sense of infinite possibility.
c My favourite author at that time was G. A. Henty, and
the only prize I ever got at school was Through the Sikh
War . I remember walking home in the moonlight with
my father and mother after the prize-giving and school
concert in a daze of exaltation and pride.’ The kindling-
wood is always there if only a flame be found. In Gill’s
case Catholicism supplied the flame.

What followed in one sense is anti-climax, the pro-
gress of an artist not of the first rank — the railway engines
giving place to architectural plans and those to letter-
cutting and monumental masonry: the artist impressing
himself on the face of London in W. H. Smith signs, in
self-conscious Stations of the Cross. Is it for this — and
the little albums of dimly daring nudes — that the father
painfully taught the love of God ? As an artist Gill gained
nothing from his faith, but the flame had been lit none
the less; and perhaps it was the inability to express his
vision that drove him into eccentricity — to the com-
munity life at Ditchling, from which again he fled when
it became advertised by his Dominican friends — the
disciplined Catholic private life advertised like the
machine-made bread. His beard and his biretta were

348

ERIC GILL

the expressions of fury against his environment. He hated
commercial civilization, and everything he did was
touched by it — a new kind of repository art grew up
undo: his influence; above all, he hated his fellow-
Catholics because he felt that they had betrayed their
Catholicism, and of them he hated the priesthood most.
It seemed to him that they had compromised too easily
with capitalism, like that Bishop of San Luis Potosi, who
hid the Papal Encyclical, De Rerum Novarum , in the
cellars of the Palace because he believed it would en-
courage Communism.

‘The clergy seem to regard it as their job to support a
social order which as far as possible forces us to commit
all the sins they denounce. ... A man can be a very good
Catholic in a factory, our parish priest used to be fond of
saying. And he was very annoyed and called us bolshevists
when we retorted: yes, but it requires heroic virtue and
you have no right to demand heroic virtue from anyone,
and certainly not from men and women in thousands and
millions . 5

And again he wrote: ‘Persons whom you would have
thought could hardly exist. Catholic bank clerks and
stockbrokers for instance, are the choice flower of our
great Catholic schools.’

There, of course, he went wrong; Waterton is a much
more likely product of Stonyhurst than a bank clerk, but
he was right on the main issue — that in this country
Catholicism which should produce revolutionaries pro-
duces only eccentrics (eccentricity thrives on an unequal
social system), and that Conservatism and Catholicism
should be as impossible bedfellows as Catholicism and

349

SOME CHARACTERS

National Socialism. Out of his gritty childhood and his
discovered faith a rebel should have been bom; he wrote
like a rebel with a magnificent disregard for grammar,
but something went wrong. Perhaps he made too much
money, perhaps he was half-tamed by his Dominican
friends ; whatever the reason his rebellion never amounted
to much — an article in a quarterly suppressed by the
episcopate, addresses to a working men’s college, fervent
little articles on sex. That overpowering tradition of
eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most
outrageous anti-clerical utterances caused only a knowing
smile on the face of the faithful. The beard and the
biretta won — he was an eccentric too.

1941

350

HERBERT READ

Some years ago Mr Read published an account of his
childhood under the title The Innocent Eye . It must have
come as a surprise to many of his readers that the critic of
Art Nozo was brought up on a Yorkshire farm: a whole
world of the imagination seems to separate the vale, the
orchard, the foldgarth, the mill, and the stockyard — the
fine simple stony architecture of his childhood — from
what was to come, which one is tempted unfairly to
picture as a long empty glossy gallery with one abstrac-
tion by Mr Ben Nicholson on the farther wall, perhaps
two Ideas and a Navel in clay by Mr Hans Arp on a
pedestal on the parquet, and a Calder decoration of wires
with little balls attached dangling from the ceiling.

‘The basin at times was very wide, especially in the
clearness of a summer’s day; but as dusk fell it would
suddenly contract, the misty hills would draw near, and
with night they had clasped us close: the centre of the
world had become a candle shining from the kitchen
window. Inside, in the sitting-room where we spent most
of our life, a lamp was lit, with a ground glass shade like
a full yellow moon. There we were bathed before the fire,
said our prayers kneeling on the hearthrug, and then dis-
appeared up the steep stairs lighted by a candle to bed/
Now Mr Read has written a sequel to The Innocent
Eye? taking the account of his own life on out of the
Yorkshire vale: a grim Spartan orphan’s school with a
strong religious tone and the young Read absorbed in
Rider Haggard; a clerkship in a Leeds Savings Bank at
£20 a year, and the slightly older Read becoming a Tory
and reading Disraeli and Burke; then Leeds University
and loss of faith, religious and political, and so the war,
* Annals of Innocence and Experience .

351

SOME CHARACTERS

and after it the literary career — and the settled literary
personality, the agnostic, the anarchist, and the romantic,
bearing rather heavily the load of new knowledge and
new art, the theories of Freud blurring the clear innocent
eye. The first book was one of the finest evocations of
childhood in our language : the second — finely written as
it often is — records a rather dusty pilgrimage towards a
dubious and uninteresting conclusion: "This book will
attempt to show how I have come to believe that the high-
est manifestation of the immanent will of the universe is
the work of art" — sight giving place to thought: to
abstractions which have not been abstracted but found
ready-made — and in an odd way it doesn’t quite ring
true. There’s an absence of humility, and no one can
adequately write of his own life without humility. When
Mr Read, writing of his youth, remarks that ‘in a few
years there was scarcely any poem of any worth in my
own language which I had not read’; when he writes of
religion in a few dogmatic sentences as the phantasy of an
afterlife conceived in the fear of death, we have travelled
a long way with him — too far — from the objective light
of childhood and the first ‘kill’. ‘I do not remember the
blood, nor the joking huntsmen; only the plumed breath
of the horses, the jingle of their harness, the beads of dew
and the white gossamer on the tangled hedge beside us.’

We have travelled too far, but we should never have
known without The Innocent Eye quite how far we had
travelled. That is the astounding thing — Mr Read was
able to go back, back from the intellectual atmosphere
personified in Freud, Bergson, Croce, Dewey, Vivante,
Scheller. . . . And if we examine his work there have al-
ways been phases when he has returned: the creative
spirit has been more than usually separated in his case

352

HERBERT READ

from the critical mind. (He admits himself in one essay
that submitting to the creative impulse he has written
poetry which owes nothing to his critical theories.) The
critic, one feels, has sometimes been at pains to adopt the
latest psychological theories before they have proved
their validity — rather as certain Anglican churchmen leap
for confirmation of their faith on the newest statement of
an astronomer. But the creative spirit has remained tied
to innocence. ‘The only real experiences in life’, writes
Mr Read, ‘being those lived with a virgin sensibility — so
that we only hear a tone once, only see a colour once, see,
hear, touch, taste, and smell everything but once, the first
time . 5 One of the differences between writers is this stock
of innocence: the virgin sensibility in some cases lasts
into middle age : in Mr Read’s case, we feel, as in so many
of his generation, it died of the shock of war and personal
loss. When the Armistice came: ‘There were misty fields
around us, and perhaps a pealing bell to celebrate our
victory. But my heart was numb and my mind dismayed :
I turned to the fields and walked away from all human
contacts.’ In future there was to be no future : as a critic he
was to be sometimes pantingly contemporary, and when
he was most an artist he was to be farthest removed from
his time.

‘When most an artist’ : we are not permanently inter-
ested in any other aspect of Mr Read’s work. Anarchism
means more to him than it will ever mean to his readers
(in spite of that vigorous and sometimes deeply moving
book, Poetry and Anarchism ) — sometimes we suspect that
it means little more to him than an attempt to show his
Marxist critics that he too is a political animal, to give a
kind of practical everyday expression to the ‘sense of
glory ’ which has served him ever since youth in place of a

23 — C.E.G.G.

353

SOME CHARACTERS

religious faith; and I cannot share his belief that criticism
with the help of Freud will become a science, and a
critical opinion have the universality of a scientific law.
As an artist he will be assessed, it seems to me, by The
Innocent Eye, by his only novel, The Green Child , by a few
poems — notably The End of a War, by his study of Words-
worth, informed as it is by so personal a passion that it is
lifted out of the category of criticism (‘we both spring
from the same yeoman stock of the Yorkshire dales, and I
thinkl have a certain “empathetic” understanding of his
personality which gives a sense of betrayal to anything I
write about him 5 ), and some scattered essays in which,
too, the note of ‘betrayal’ is evident — the essays on
Froissart, Malory, and Vauvenargues in particular.

It is that author with whom we wish to dwell — however
much lip service we may pay to books like Art and
Society , Art Now, Art and Industry and the rest — the
author who describes himself: ‘ In spite of my intellectual
pretensions, I am by birth and tradition a peasant.’ Even
his political thought at its most appealing comes back to
that sense of soil, is tethered to the Yorkshire farm — ‘real
politics are local politics’. The result of separating Mr
Read’s creative from his critical work has an odd effect —
there is colour, warmth, glow, the passion which
surrounds the ‘sense of glory’, and we seem far removed
from the rather dry critic with his eyes fixed on the dis-
tinctions between the ego and the id. The mill where the
hero of The Green Child rescues Siloen from the sullen
bullying passion of Kneeshaw is his uncle’s mill — just as
the stream which had reversed its course is ‘the mys-
terious water’ which dived underground and re-emerged
in his uncle’s field. And it may not be too imaginative to
trace the dreadful sight that met Olivero’s eyes through

354

HERBERT READ

the mill window as Kneeshaw tried to force the Green
Child to drink the blood of a newly-killed lamb to that
occasion in the foldgarth when the child crushed his
finger in the machine for crushing oil-cake. "I fainted
with the pain, and the horror of that dim milk-white panic
is as ineffaceable as the scar which my flesh still bears. 5

"Milk-white panic 5 : like the Green Child himself Mr
Read has a horror of violence — a horror which preceded
the war and did not follow it. The conflict always present
in his work is between the fear and the glory — between
the "milk-white panic 5 and the vision which was felt by
"the solitary little alien in the streets of Leeds 5 , the un-
controllable ambition which "threw into the cloudy future
an infinite ray in which there could always be seen, like a
silver knight on a white steed, this unreal figure which
was myself, riding to quixotic combats, attaining a blind-
ing and indefinable glory 5 . If art is the resolution of a
combat, here surely is the source of Mr Read's finest
work. Very far back — farther than the author can take us
— the conflict originated : it was already established when
the machine closed, when the small boy felt the excite-
ment of King Solomon’s Mines and Montezuma’s
Daughter . Both sides of the conflict are personified and
expressed in his poem The End of a War> in which the
sense of glory is put first into the mouth of a dying
German officer and then into the dialogue between the
soul and body of the girl whom the Germans had raped
and murdered — the glory of surrender to nationality and
to faith, and last the revulsion in the mouth of an English
officer waking on the morning of peace and addressing
his dead enemy — the revulsion of an ordinary man
crushed by the machine who has no sense of glory in
martial action or in positive faith, caught up in violence

355

SOME CHARACTERS

and patiently carrying out of the conflict only the empiri-
cal knowledge that he has at least survived.

The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling
for you but not for me — for you
whose gentian eyes stared from the cold
impassive alp of death . You betrayed us
at the last hour of the last day
playing the game to the end ,
your smile the only comment
on the well-done deed. What mind
have you carried over the confines ?

Your fair face was noble of its kind,
some visionary purpose cut the lines
clearly on that countenance .

But you are defeated : once again
the meek inherit the kingdom of God .

No might can win against this wandering
wavering grace of humble men .

You die, in all your power and pride:

I live, in my meekness justified.

Because we have detected a conflict between the sense
of glory and the fear of violence it mustn’t be thought
that we have mistaken the meaning Mr Read has attached
to glory: glory, he has written many times, is not merely
martial glory, or ambition . 6 Glory is the radiance in which
virtues flourish. The love of glory is the sanction of great
deeds; all greatness and magnanimity proceed not from
calculation but from an instinctive desire for the quality
of glory. Glory is distinguished from fortune, because
fortune exacts care; you must connive with your fellows
and compromise yourself in a thousand ways to make

356

HERBERT READ

sure of its fickle favours. Glory is gained directly, if one
has the genius to deserve it: glory is sudden/

In that sense glory is always surrender — the English
officer also experienced glory in the completeness of his
surrender to the machine: the 'wavering grace’ too is
glory. But just as the meaning of glory extends far beyond
great deeds, so the fear of violence extends to the same
borders. Surrender of any kind seems a betrayal: the
milk-white panic is felt at the idea of any self-revelation.
The intellect strives to be impersonal, and the conflict
becomes as extensive as life — life as the artist describes it
today, 'empty of grace, of faith, of fervour, and magna-
nimity’.

Glory in that sense cannot be attained by the artist, for
glory is the cessation of conflict: it is private like death.
The mystic, the soldier, even the politician can attain
glory — the artist can only express his distant sense of it.
In his novel. The Green Child , Mr Read conveyed as he
had never done before, even in The End of a War y that
private sense of glory. We see it working inwards from
political glory — from the ideal state which Olivero found
in South America back to the source of inspiration, the
home of the 'innocent eye’, back through fantasy to the
dream of complete glory — the absolute surrender. Alone
in his crystalline grotto, somewhere below the earth’s
surface, to which the Green Child led him, sinking
through the water at the mill-stream’s source, Olivero
awaits death and petrifaction — the sense of sin which
came between Wordsworth and his glory has been
smoothed out, passion, the fear of death, all the motives
of conflict have been eliminated as they had been from
the dying German. Desire is limited to the desire of the
final surrender, of becoming first rock, then crystal, of

357

SOME CHARACTERS

reaching permanency — ambition could hardly go farther.

‘When the hated breath at last left the human body,
that body was carried to special caves, and then laid out
in troughs filled with petrous water that dripped from
roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned
white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under the
vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp
snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles . .

It is the same sense of glory that impelled Christian
writers to picture the City of God — both are fantasies,
both are only expressions of a sense unattained by the
author, both, therefore, are escapes : the solution of con-
flict can come no other way. The difference, of course, is
that the Christian artist believes that his fantasy is some-
where attainable: the agnostic knows that no Green
Child will ever really show him the way to absolute glory.

The difference — though for the living suffering man it
represents all the difference between hell and purgatory
— is not to us important. Christian faith might have
borne poorer fruits than this sense of unattainable glory
lodged in the child’s brain on a Yorkshire farm forty
years ago. Mr Read’s creative production has been small,
but I doubt whether any novel, poem, or work of criti-
cism, is more likely to survive the present anarchy than
The Green Child , The End of a War> and Wordsworth
The critic who has hailed so many new fashions in paint-
ing and literature has himself supplied the standards of
permanence by which these fashions will be condemned.

1941

358

THE CONSERVATIVE

All along the wide stony high street of Chipping Camp-
den one is aware of stopped clocks. Time has been
strenuously and persistently defied — almost successfully.
Even the public telephone box — after a short struggle
with the Post Office — has been allowed to wear the
protective colouring of Cotswold stone. At one time a
lady did rebel, painting her seventeenth-century door
scarlet, but the slow pressure of well-directed public
opinion won in the end. Everything here is preserved —
even the smells. So remarkable an attempt to halt the
passage of time is of more than local interest: its success
can be judged in the late F. L. Griggs’s drawings now
published, together with an introduction by Mr Russell
Alexander.* As drawings they are not of wide interest,
but to anyone who knows Campden they will recall very
vividly the geography of this strange experiment in
escape — with its stone continuity of building from
the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, as if the mind
of man here had always taken as his main motto:
‘ Conserve.’

No one conserved more passionately than the late F. L.
Griggs: he built his own house of solid stone with little
mediaeval rooms, no telephone and no electric light. New
bungalows and workmen’s cottages were pushed under
his leadership beyond the imaginary walls of what was in
effect a dream town — they littered the road to the station
and the road to Broadway, which was always to Campden
an example of a town that had not sufficiently conserved.
Griggs was a Roman Catholic, and so were most of the
inhabitants of Campden. He believed in guilds and the

* Campden: xxxiv Engravings after Pen Drawings , by F. L. Griggs.

R.A.

359

SOME CHARACTERS

love of craftsmanship: he had a mindVeye picture —
which he sometimes engraved — of what an English town
had been like before the Reformation, and to this he
wanted Campden to conform.

But when you begin to conserve, you conserve more
than you ever intend. Griggs had not meant to conserve
the puritan spirit, and he certainly had no intention of
conserving the slum cottages where women had to sleep
in wet weather with a basin on the bed to catch the rain,
or the one pump which served a whole hamlet. Some of
Griggs’s impressions are given in his friend’s introduc-
tion — the qualities of the stillness and the light, the
sound of bells and the smoke of jam-making; he tells us
of the old names still left: Poppetts Alley and Calf Lane
and the Live and Let Live Inn. There are anecdotes of
old almspeople — Mrs Beales saying of her husband,
Noah, c ’Twere a bit thoughtless of him to die just as the
currants wanted picking 5 , and Mrs Nobbs avoiding an
aristocratic festivity in a local park, C I didn’t go, for I
shouldn’t a knowed nobody, and what with the junketing
and the music I should ha’bin fair moictered. So I
spended the day in the Churchyard amongst the folks
as I knowed, areading of their stwuns.’ It is tempting to
believe that by conserving the architecture you conserve
such simple, wise, patient people as this — but is it true ?
In any case you conserve, too, the imprisoning conditions
which led, as I can remember, one young married woman
to leave home early of a winter morning, walk the three
miles to Batsford Park, and break her way through the
ice of an artificial lake until she had reached a depth
where she could drown.

The ghost of the dancing bear that haunts the pump at
the bottom of Mud Lane, the ghost of the great hound on

360

THE CONSERVATIVE

Aston Hill, out of superstitions like these it is easy to
construct a dream town where unhappiness has the faded
air of history. But to live there you must build the walls,
not round the town, but round yourself, excluding any
knowledge that the eye doesn’t take in — the strange
incestuous relationships of the very poor, the wife starved
to death according to country gossip, the agricultural
labourers who lived on credit all the winter through.

1941

361

NORMAN DOUGLAS

In those last years you would always find him between
six and dinner-time in the Cafe Vittoria, unfashionably
tucked away behind the Piazza. Through the shabby
windows one stared across at Naples — one could go only
a few steps further without tumbling off the island alto-
gether. Crouched over an aperitif (too often in the last
years almost unalcoholic), his fingers knotted with rheu-
matism, squawking his £ Georgio, Georgio’ to summon
the devoted waiter who could hear that voice immediately
above all the noises of Capri, snow-white hair stained
here and there a kind of butterfly-yellow with nicotine,
Norman Douglas sat on the borders of the kingdom he
had built house by house, character by character, legend
by legend.

One remembers him a few months before he died,
handling the typescript of this book,* re-sorting the
loose carbon pages: there wasn’t enough room on the
cafe table what with the drinks, the old blue beret, the
snuff-box, the fair copy; the wind would keep on picking
up a flimsy carbon leaf and shifting it out of place, but
the old ruler was back at the old game of ruling. He
wouldn’t have given even the menial task of assembly to
another. With a certain fuss of pleasure and a great tacit
pride he was handling a new book of his own again.
There hadn’t been a new book for — how many years ?
Sometimes something seemed to be wrong with the
typescript ; a monologue of exaggerated grumbles marked
the misprints — not one of those earlier misprints care-
fully preserved in proof, to be corrected later in manu-
script gratis for a friend and at a price for collectors —

* Venus in the Kitchen.

362

NORMAN DOUGLAS

‘Cost him a tenner, my dear’ — and that sudden laugh
would break like an explosion in a quarry, over before
the noise has reached you.

My generation was brought up on South Windy al-
though I suppose the book was already five years old
before we opened it and read the first sentence, ‘The
bishop was feeling rather sea-sick’, which seemed to
liberate us from all the serious dreary immediate past.
Count Caloveglia, Don Francesco, Cornelius van Kop-
pen. Miss Wilberforce, Mme Steynlin, Mr Fames, Saint
Dodekanus, the Alpha and Omega Club : Nepenthe had
not been Capri, but Capri over half a century has striven
with occasional success to be Nepenthe. South Wind
appeared in 1917, superbly aloof from the catastrophes
of the time : it was the age of Galsworthy, Wells, Bennett,
Conrad: of a sometimes inflated, of a sometimes rough-
and-ready prose. Novelists were dealing with c big’ sub-
jects — family panoramas, conflicts of loyalty. How
reluctantly we came to the last sentence: ‘For it was
obvious to the meanest intelligence that Mr Keith was
considerably drunk.’ This wasn’t the world of Lord Jim
or the Forsytes or the dreary Old Wives.

South Wind was to have many inferior successors: a
whole Capri school. Douglas was able to convey to others
some of his tolerance for human foibles : characters like
Mr Parker and Mr Keith were taken up like popular
children and spoiled. It became rather easy to write a
novel, as the reviewers would say, ‘in the manner of
South Wind*. None of Douglas’s disciples had learnt to
write as he had. Nearly a quarter of a century of clean,
scholarly, exact writing, beginning so unrewardingly with
a Foreign Office report on the Pumice Stone Industry of
the Lipari Islands by the Third Secretary of Her

363

SOME CHARACTERS

Majesty’s Embassy in St Petersburg, published by the
Stationery Office at a halfpenny, went to the creation of
Pereili’s Antiquities and ‘the unpublished chronicle of
Father Capocchio, a Dominican friar of licorous and even
licentious disposition, a hater of Nepenthe . .

Douglas died in the middle eighties after a life consist-
ently open, tolerant, unashamed. ‘Ill spent’ it has been
called by the kind of judges whose condemnation is the
highest form of praise. In a sense he had created Capri:
there have been suicides, embezzlements, rapes, thefts,
bizarre funerals, and old processions which we feel would
not have happened exactly in that way if Douglas had not
existed, and some of his tolerance perhaps touched even
the authorities when they came to deal with those events.

It is fitting, I think, that his last book should be as
unserious and shameless as this collection of aphrodisiac
recipes, to close a life in which he had enjoyed varied
forms of love, left a dozen or so living tokens here and
there, and been more loved himself than most men. (One
remembers the old gypsy family from northern Italy who
travelled all the way to Capri to spend an afternoon with
Douglas and proudly exhibit to him another grandchild.)
With its air of scholarship, its blend of the practical — the
almond soup — and the wildly impracticable — Roti sans
Pared, the crispness of the comments (we only have to
add his customary endearments to hear the ghost speak) :
‘Veiy stimulating, my dear’, ‘Much ado about nothing’,
‘Not very useful for people of cold temperament’, with
a certain dry mercilessness in the introduction, this book
will be one of my favourite Douglases: it joins Old
Calabria* Fountains in the Sand , They Went* Looking
Back* London Street Games* the forbidden anthology of
limericks.

364

NORMAN DOUGLAS

He will be delighted in the shades at any success we
may have with his recipes and bark with laughter at our
ignominious failures, and how pleased he will be at any
annotations and additions, so long as they are exact,
scholarly, uninflated, and do not carpingly rise from a
cold temperament. For even his enormous tolerance had
certain limits. He loved life too well to have much
patience with puritans or fanatics. He was a gentleman
and he disliked a boor. One of the finest passages of in-
vective written in our time is his pamphlet against D. H.
Lawrence in defence of Maurice Magnus, and an echo of
that old controversy can be found in these pages.

4 Not many years ago I met in the South of France a
Mr D. H. Lawrence, an English painter, whom I inter-
ested in this subject and who certainly looked as if his
own health would have been improved by a course of
such recipes as I had gathered together . 5

There are said to be certain Jewish rabbis who perform
the operation of circumcision with their thumbnail so
rapidly and painlessly that the child never cries. So with-
out warning Douglas operates, and the victim has no
time to realize in what purgatorio of lopped limbs he is
about to awake, among the miserly, the bogus, the boring,
and the ungenerous.

1952

365

INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

In a book* which is at times crude and conceited, at
others perceptive and tender, Havelock Ellis tells the
story of an * advanced 5 marriage. That is really the whole
subject — there are chapters on his family and his child-
hood, on his experiences in Australia as a young
school-teacher buried in a bush station and first con-
ceiving his career in sexology, but these are only intro-
ductory to his meeting with Edith Lees, the secretary of
the New Fellowship, and their long unhappy theoretical
marriage. The background is already period: an odd
charm hangs around the Fabian Society, around
anarchists, feminism, what Ellis himself calls in an
admirable phrase, "that high-strung ethical tension’ : it is
necessary to be reminded that encased in those years were
real people, muddled and earnest and tortured.

This is an extraordinarily intimate autobiography, far
too intimate to be suitable for general reading. c What can
it matter when we are both dead ? Who can be hurt if she
and I, who might have been hurt, are now only a few
handfuls of ashes flung over the grass and flowers ? To
do what I have done here has been an act of prolonged
precision in cold blood, beyond anything else that I have
ever written. For I know that, to a large extent, the world
is inhabited by people to whom one does too much

honour by calling them fools All mankind may now,

if they will, conspire together to hurt us. We shall not
feel it.’

But it was really they who conspired together to hurt
each other, talking it all out beforehand — economics,
heredity, birth-control — strolling along a Cornish beach,
an odd, earnest, pathetic pair of lovers, who had left out

* My Ufe > by Havelock Ellis.

3 66

INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

of account all natural uneugenic feelings of jealousy or
possession. Members of the New Fellowship presented
them with a complete set of Emerson’s Works.

But even under those auspices the marriage went
wrong. There was never much passionate love between
them, and Ellis soon considered himself at liberty to take
a mistress. Writing forty years later he remained con-
vinced that his wife had no ground for objection.
Objection in any case was swept away by theory; the wife
had to be friends with the mistress, and Ellis could see
no reason for her pain when she pleaded against a meet-
ing between the lovers in the Cornish village where she
and Ellis had first loved. So it went on — the woman
always more natural than the man and struggling to be
reasonable in his way. The pain stabs out from letter
after letter, but Ellis never saw it, chiding her tenderly
for failure in sympathy or understanding.

After a time they ceased to live as man and wife,
though a kind of passionate tenderness always remained
like a buoy to mark the position of a wreck. In London,
Ellis had a flat of his own, and in the country they lived
in two adjoining cottages (the middle-aged man, when
his wife was ill, lay with one ear glued to the intervening
wall). All the while Mrs Ellis was being driven to the last
breakdown of health and sanity by the remorseless
Moloch theories that love was free, jealousy ignoble, pos-
session an indignity. She couldn’t always keep it up. c Oh :
Havelock, don’t feel you don’t want me. I let myself drift
into thinking you only want Amy and not me. ... All I
feel I want in the world is to get into your arms and be
told you want me to live.’ This towards the end of her
life, for the miracle was that their love was never killed
by the theory — it was only tortured. On his side he never

367

SOME CHARACTERS

relented; he would write coolly, tenderly back about the
spring flowers, and his work was never interrupted: the
sexology studies continued to appear, full of case histories
and invincible ignorance. And yet, between this ageing
man with his fake prophet’s air — rather like a Santa Claus
at Selfridge’s — and the woman haunted by extending
loneliness and suspicion, so much love remained that one
mourns at the thought of what was lost to them because
they had not been bom into the Christian tradition. Years
after her death he writes with a kind of exalted passion
and a buried religious feeling: c Whenever nowadays I go
about London on my business or my recreation, I con-
stantly come upon them [places where they had met] :
here she stood; here we met; here we once sat together;
just as even in places where she never went, I come upon
some object, however trifling, which leads, by a tenuous
thread of suggestion, to her. So that it sometimes seems
to me that at every step of my feet and at every move-
ment of my thought I see before me something which
speaks of her, and my heart grows suddenly tender and
my lips murmur involuntarily: “My darling!” ’

1940

368

THE VICTOR AND THE VICTIM

Once when I was spending some weeks in a leproserie
in the Belgian Congo, across the border from Dr
Schweitzer’s famous hospital at Lambarene, the doctor
spoke to me of " sentimental’ and "scientific’ leper colo-
nies. He did not use the word sentimental in any pejora-
tive sense — the sentimental hospital offers something to
the human mind in pain or despair which the scientific
may not be able to do, and the scientific sometimes fails
by reason of its own dogmas. (In Brazil, in the wonder-
fully organized leper colonies there, the babies are sep-
arated at birth from the mother, so that for the sake of
statistics — no leper children — there is a thirty per cent
rate of infantile mortality.)

Nobody could fail, after reading Dr Franck’s fascinat-
ing account* of his stay at Lambarene where he organized
a dental clinic, to put this hospital and the adjoining leper
village in the category of sentimental, and his admirable
drawings, which remind one sometimes of a Segonzac
transported to Central Africa, bring the reader closer
than any photographs to the heroism and squalor and
the unexpected laissez-faire of this strange settlement
on the Ogowe river.

Here is the Doctor, myopic in his thick glasses, bent
close over his writing desk while the ants, whom he feeds
daily with raw fish, swarm across his papers: here is the
makeshift room which has yet lasted a long lifetime with
the old-fashioned iron bedstead, the mosquito net, the
ewer and basin, the oil lamp, the books stacked on the
floor with the wooden crates, and the palm trees with
their piano-key leaves blocking the view outside. So
much here is makeshift: the bed on pulleys for the

* Days with Albert Schweitzer , by Frederick Franck.

24 — C.E.G.G. 369

SOME CHARACTERS

paralysed patient made out of packing cases, the bed-
ridden man hatching eggs, Dr Franck’s own cubby-hole
of a clinic, only partially separated from an emergency
operating room on one side and a delivery room on the
other. And as for the laissez-faire, here are the animals
which roam Lambarene, the cats, dogs, monkeys, pigs,
antelopes, and the Nubian goats, a present from the
States — they proved to be milkless and yet linger on,
producing a few anaemic kids : —

‘You feed the animals when ever you feel like it, you
can even pet them within limits but always with the back
of your hand, because all these goats and dogs and cats
visit sick wards teaming with microbial life of the most
horrifying varieties, walk through grass through which
lepers just waded, and are (if someone wanted to estab-
lish records) perhaps the greatest microbe carriers per
square inch of body surface anywhere on earth.’

It is easy to notice the debit side of a ‘sentimental’
African hospital. I have visited one myself in the bush
near the river Ruki, a leproserie of mud huts without a
doctor, served by two African dispensers and one Euro-
pean nun who bicycles through the forest every morning
from her convent by the river, and sometimes in depres-
sion I am haunted by the memory of the woman who,
hearing me enter the darkness of her hut, crawled out of
a pitch black inner room like a dog from a kennel, unable
even to raise her head, making sounds which even my
African companion could not interpret into human words.

But certainly in the case of leprosy there is a credit
side to the sentimental. Now that leprosy is curable,
more and more attention must be paid to the psycholo-

370

THE VICTOR AND THE VICTIM

gical problem of the patient. The careful can never be
quite carefree, and in a squalor shared by those who serve
perhaps a relationship grows. 6 The hospital without the
animals ’, Dr Franck writes , 6 would perhaps be wiser but
certainly much sadder.’

Dr Schweitzer has become a victim of his own legend,
a legend which would not have grown up around a more
scientific hospital. Other men — Dr Harley, of Ganta in
Liberia, is only one example — have given up their lives
as completely to the Africans, but because of Dr Schweit-
zer’s prowess on the organ, his life of Bach, his books of
philosophy, the Nobel Prize, the camera-eye of the
popular Press has picked out Lambarene, a camera-eye
which more often than not distorts the image. And in
the wake of publicity, however unsought, inevitably
comes denigration. (Envy is one of the distinguishing
marks of man.)

Journalists writing emotionally and inaccurately of
Schweitzer, lying in little ways for the sake of the news-
paper story, have conveyed to the world a false Schweitzer
whom it is easy to attack. Some of us who have at best
one talent to develop become jealous and critical of a man
who has developed, as Dr Franck writes, 4 every one of
his potentialities to its utmost limits’. The man who
sometimes seems hidden in limelight more than in forest
may not be a great musician or a great philosopher or a
great doctor, but his achievement, at this moment of
history, is more important than his music, his writing, or
his medical skill: ‘The Grand Docteur will live on as the
man in whom the Western conscience became incarnate
long before it was exploited in order to adorn a political
holding-action in black Africa.’

1959

371

SIMONE WEIL

Simone Weil was a young Jewish teacher of philosophy
who died in exile from her native France in 1943 at the
age of thirty-four. Since that time knowledge of her has
spread by word of mouth, like the knowledge of some
underground leader in wartime. This is her first book*
to be published in English, the first message to reach us,
though we had known that she had been acclaimed by
both Catholics and Protestants in France. We read with
excitement as the signals are handed in: contact at last
has been made: and with a growing doubt. Here is a
moment of vision : this we understand ; but this ? — surely
the message must have been mutilated, for it seems to
contradict what went before; and this? — the phrases
seem jumbled, they mean litde to us.

The most important part of the book, apart from the
essay ‘ Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, does literally
consist of messages, letters written to a Father Perrin, a
Dominican in Marseilles, the first three explaining why
she is hesitating to be baptised, the last three giving her
spiritual autobiography, an account of her intellectual
vocation, and her last thoughts before leaving North
Africa for England and being finally separated from her
spiritual adviser (if one can so call one whose advice was
never taken, and who was more often than not the victim
of her preaching). It is a great pity that we cannot read
Father Perrin’s replies. From her references to them we
can imagine their careful sympathetic approach to her
problems, the vain attempt to guide the wide wash of her
mystical thought into a channel where it could increase
in depth.

Her abiding concern was her relationship to God and

* Waiting on God , by Simone WeiL
372

SIMONE WEIL

the Church. She had come to believe in the Christian
God, in the Incarnation, and the dogmas of the Roman
Catholic Church (of its social functions, perhaps natur-
ally, as one who had experienced for some weeks the
hardships of the Catalonian front, she remained sus-
picious), but she had no will to take the next step. She
expected God to intervene, to push her into the Church
if he so desired. She would not act except under orders.
"If it is God’s will that I should enter the Church, He
will impose this will upon me at the exact moment when
I shall have come to deserve that He should so impose it. 5
Rut how can one deserve without some action, if only of
the mind ? She pays lip-service occasionally to free-will,
but we cannot help feeling that she unduly restricted its
scope. There are traces of Gnosticism in her postpone-
ment of baptism until she could be certain of perfection.

£ I think that only those who are above a certain level of
spirituality can participate in the sacraments as such. For
as long as those who are below this level have not reached
it, whatever they may do, they cannot be strictly said to
belong to the Church.’

It was a strange attitude for a woman who wished
ardently to share the labours of the poor, working with
broken health in the Renault works, and who in safe
England confined herself to the rations of those she had
left in France. The Church was for the perfect. She could
not see it as a being like herself, anxious to share the
sufferings not only of the poor but of the imperfect, even
of the vicious. She speaks to us in terms of ‘abandon-
ment’, but her abandonment always stops short of sur-
render, like a histrionic marble figure caught in a gesture
not far removed from pride.

Her claims on our submission to her thought, and on

373

SOME CHARACTERS

our credulity, too, are vast. She tells us how once when
she was reciting George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’, ‘Christ
Himself came down and took possession of me’, and
again, referring to the Our Father, ‘sometimes also,
during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is
present with me in person, but His presence is infinitely
more real, more moving, more clear than on that first
occasion’. We cannot help comparing this blunt claim
with the long painful obscure journey towards the Beati-
fic Vision described by St John of the Cross and St
Teresa of Avila. But perhaps the greatest claim she makes
is to a kind of universal inclusiveness :

‘The degree of intellectual honesty which is obligatory
for me, by reason of my particular vocation, demands
that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without
exception, including for instance materialism and
atheism; it must be equally welcoming and equally
reserved with regard to every one of them.’

One cannot deny, however, that these claims are some-
times supported by moments of vision: passages of great
power and insight capable of drawing many enthusiasts
to her side. The essay on Friendship is the most sustained
of these passages, but again and again they flash through
the contradictions and the muddled thought:

‘The outward results of true affliction are nearly
always bad. We lie when we try to disguise this. It is in
affliction itself that the splendour of God’s mercy shines;
from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable
bitterness. If, still persevering in our love, we fall to the
point where the soul cannot keep back the cry, “ My God,

374

SIMONE WEIL

why hast thou forsaken me ? ”, if we remain at this point
without ceasing to love, we end by touching something
which is not affliction, which is not joy; something which
is the central essence, necessary and pure; something
not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow; something
which is the very love of God.’

What makes us in the end unwilling to accept her
claims ? What is it that more often than not distorts her
genuine love of truth ? Is it that confusion arises first
from her pride, and secondly — because she was a woman
of great nobility — from the tension and pain in her own
mind caused by that possessive demon ? She claims too
much (St Joan heard rightly when she was told to tell no
one of her visions), and sometimes too stridently. She
talks of suffering ‘atrocious pain 5 for others, ‘those who
are indifferent or unknown to me . . . including those of
the most remote ages of antiquity 5 , and it is almost as if a
comic character from Dickens were speaking. We want to
say, ‘Don’t go so far so quickly. Suffer first for someone
you know and love 5 , but love in these pages is only a uni-
versal love. She strikes out blindly in her personal pain,
contradicting herself, allowing herself to believe that an
‘infinite 5 mercy can be shown in its entirety in a ‘finite 5
world. She no sooner seizes a truth than she lets it go in
the pride of a too startling image. We leave her at the end
on the edge of the abyss, digging her feet in, refusing to
leap like the common herd (whom she loved in her col-
lective way), demanding that she alone be singled out by
a divine hand on her shoulder forcing her to yield.

1951

375

THREE PRIESTS

i. THE OXFORD CHAPLAIN

A P R i E s T presents even more difficulties to his biographer
than a writer. As with an iceberg, little shows compared
with what lies beneath : we have to dive for depth, but if
we so dive we have the sense of breaking into a life more
private and exclusive than a bedroom. We need not
hesitate much over a man’s love affairs; they are in a
sense public, for they are shared with another human
being, if not with waiters, chambermaids, that intimate
friend; but when a man prays he is quite alone. His
biographer — except when controversy, persecution,
sanctity, or disgrace lend to the story a spurious drama —
must write a life of his hero which excludes the hero’s
chief activity.

This Mr Waugh does with a sense of style which would
have delighted his subject and an exquisite tact which
Father Knox had obviously foreseen in asking him to be
his biographer.* It is no fault of Mr Waugh that the story
lags a litde in the middle, during the years of the Oxford
chaplaincy, the years of the satirical essayist and the
detective writer, the years of popularity, the years of
4 Ronnie’. Every Catholic, I suppose, has his favourite
type of priest. The Knox of Oxford, the Knox of the
rather precious style and of the Latin verses, the chaplain
and the translator, had his apostolate in a region which
I have always found uninteresting and even at moments
repellent. Writing an obituary of Father John Talbot, of
the Oratory, Knox describes this world with a, to me,
terrible precision. He knew it to the last drain of the glass
of dry sherry:

* The Life of Ronald Knox. By Evelyn Waugh.

376

SOME CHARACTERS

superficial; he had a gently humorous distrust of every-
thing foreign; he had been brought up in an age when
“Land of Hope and Glory ” had no undertone of irony,
and the stability and expansion of the British Empire and
with it the Church of England, seemed to follow a
law of nature. Even so, when all these limitations
are considered, the two propositions still seem pre-
posterous . 5

To me the beginning and the end of Mr Waugh’s
biography are outstanding: the end where Mr Waugh
has his ‘villain’ and can show Knox meeting the mean-
ness, jealousies, and misunderstandings of the hierarchy
without complaint, and the early pages which include,
besides the troubled years of the conversion, a hero of
extraordinary interest, Knox’s grandfather, the Anglican
Bishop of Lahore. This old man, after his retirement,
set out ‘unpaid and alone’ for the Muslim strongholds of
North Africa and Muscat and died in solitude attended
at the last by a family of Goanese Catholics whom he had
never consciously known. Only a writer like Mr Waugh,
who has himself travelled inahard poor fashion, couldhave
picked out so accurately the illuminating details, ‘the
waxing incandescent wind of summer’ and ‘the dirty
upper room of a Goanese grog shop’, which is so distant
from the Old Palace at Oxford.

I must be forgiven if I prefer as a character the Bishop
of Lahore. He may have been no more a mystic than his
grandson, but would he have wished to substitute for the
passage of St John translated at Douai: ‘He was in the
world and the world was made by him and the world
knew him not that smooth and ambiguous version : ‘He,
through whom the world was made, was in the world and

378

THE OXFORD CHAPLAIN

the world treated him as a stranger % which seems to echo
the Oxford common-room rather than the hut of wattle
and thatched leaves where the grandfather began his last
agony ?

1959

379

2. THE PARADOX OF A POPE

It is strange to come on a monument to a living man,*
for even the greatest usually appear only on tablets and
tombstones after death, but if we suppose a close observer
wandering through the yellow squares, the churches and
the trattorie , among the fountains and flower-stalls and
broken columns of Rome, he would notice here and there
about the city the memorials to a man still living, Eugenio
Pacelli: in an obscure side street, on the wall of a house
that has come down in the world — Tn this house was
bom . . in the hall of a school — 'Student of this
Lyceum during the years . . : at the entrance of a
church — 'Here he meditated upon the choice of his
vocation . . Pope Pius XII mummified in marble
before his death.

Our imaginary observer might well wonder at this
great harvest of tablets. For it is not enough to say that
Pacelli is the Pope. There have been so many Popes. They
stretch away like a column of ants, busy about affairs that
have often seemed to the world of small importance. An
odd anonymity shrouds the greater number of them — we
don’t remember them as we remember Kings, or even as
we remember Presidents. Their titles, stiff and unoriginal,
have a kind of text-book air. Pacelli becomes Pius XII
and already he seems fixed on a page of history (rather
dull history) with all the other Piuses (who were they ?),
fixed like a butterfly on cork, pinned out for dusty
preservation.

A few Popes, even to such a Protestant schoolboy as I
was, broke through their anonymity, generally because
they clashed with Kings or Emperors who were the more
interesting characters since they wore armour and swore

* Written in 1951.

380

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

great blinding oaths and made wars and memorable say-
ings. The only memorable saying of a Pope that we
learnt at school was far too smug — Gregory the Great,
remarking, Non angli sed angeli at the sight of the young
blond British slaves. One remembered too Innocent III
fulminating against King John, though his victory over
the King seemed a bit underhand ; corpses lying un-
buried because of the interdict did not seem to compare
in chivalry with burning lead. The Emperor Henry knelt
in the snow at Canossa and our sympathy was always
with the Emperor (already I have forgotten which was
the Pope he knelt to). Pius V (was it ?) excommunicated
Queen Elizabeth, Pio Nono fled from Rome, conquered
by Garibaldi and his romantic Red Shirts. And of course
there were the wicked Popes — Alexander VI (the Borgia)
and John XXII (I was taught for some reason that it was
very wicked to celebrate Mass in a stable, though in our
day Masses have been celebrated in places quite as
strange, in garages, peasant huts, at Russian breakfast
tables).

One knew very little about the living Pope in England
in those days just after the First World War. He was
associated rather disagreeably with a peace offer the
Allies had rejected. We were the victorious powers, or so
we then thought, so there was a somewhat disreputable
air about premature peace offers, and in any case to the
young, peace has small appeal. Ouf history books dealt
mainly with wars, and as for any peace that passes under-
standing, it was not in the school or university curricu-
lum.

I don’t think it ever occurred to us that the Pope was a
priest, or that he could be a saint. A priest was a small
sour man in black who had a tin-roofed church in a back

381

SOME CHARACTERS

street of the country town where one lived : his congrega-
tion consisted mainly, so one was told, of Irish servant-
girls, and he was never invited to dinner as the vicar was.
But still, he was a human being and had no connexion
with the out-dated tiaraed ruler in Rome. I remember
the shock of surprise at seeing a box inside a Roman
Catholic church marked Peter’s Pence — I thought that
all that had been stopped some time in the Middle Ages,
probably by King John.

But even later when I became a Catholic the Pope re-
mained a distant hierarchic figure, and one imagines he
remained so for many Catholics until contemporary
history began to break into our homes with the sound of
explosives and the sight of refugees and the sudden un-
certainty — where shall we be next year ? The Pope be-
came a man when we grew aware that he suffered from
the same anxieties and tensions as ourselves, only in-
finitely extended by his responsibility and his solitude.
When Pius XI was elected on the fourteenth ballot, the
Cardinal Primate of Hungary is reported to have said,
4 We have dragged Ratti through the fourteen Stations of
the Cross : now that he has arrived on Golgotha we leave
him alone.’ For nearly twenty years now we have become
aware of the Papacy as the point of suffering, the needle
of pain, and a certain love always arises for the man who
suffers. Pain makes an individual, whether it is a Chinese
woman weeping for her dead child or the patient figure
in the hospital bed or this man in the Vatican.

We have worked slowly towards the one particular Pope
— this priest, not so far removed from our parish priest,
forced against his will into a position of responsibility
without material power, but we cannot see him fully as
an individual man unless we see him in relation to his

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THE PARADOX OF A POPE

immediate predecessors. They have all had the same aim
— to be the servants of the servants of God, to serve the
world, to temper the winds of hate, corruption, injustice*
to give us such peace as it is possible to get here. Pacelli
becomes individual when we see how he differs from the
others in trying to attain this aim.

Since the days of Pius X that word 4 Peace 9 seems to
chime through all the encyclicals and papal letters and
speeches, just as it chimes through the Mass so that we be-
come accustomed to it in its every declension, pax, pacts ,
pacem. Pius X was Pope when the First World War broke
out. When he was asked to bless some armaments, he
replied, ‘War! I don’t want war, I don’t bless war, I
bless only peace. Gladly I would sacrifice my life to
obtain peace. 9 A fortnight after war was declared he was
dead.

Benedict XV, his successor, whose peace proposals in
1917 were rejected, who was called Papa Bosch by the
French and "the French Pope 9 by the Germans, said,
‘They want to silence me, but they shall not succeed in
sealing my lips; nobody shall prevent me from calling to
my own children, peace, peace, peace. 9 And his successor,
to whom he said these words, Pius XI remarked to an
English archbishop as the alignment for the new Hitler-
ian war became evident, ‘Peace is such a precious good
that one should not fear to buy it even at the price of
silence and concessions, although never at the price of
weakness. 9

The world has darkened progressively since those days.
Pius X was an old man ready to give his life, but a
prayer is not always answered as we want it answered.
Benedict believed in reasoned diplomacy and failed. Pius
XI believed in a mixture of shrewdness and pugnacity,

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SOME CHARACTERS

and he failed too. Now a new note sounds from the
man who was his Secretary of State and who from that
inner position saw the shrewdness and pugnacity out-
witted, and observed the limits of diplomacy. Isn’t there
a hint of despair, so far as this world is concerned, in
Pacelli when he speaks of ' Golgotha — that hill of long
awaited peace between Heaven and earth’ ? Sometimes
we almost feel he is abandoning those vast hordes of
people we call nations, the dealings with the War Lords
and Dictators, and like a parish priest in the confessional,
a cure d’Ars, he is concentrating on each individual,
teaching the individual that peace can be found on Gol-
gotha, that pain doesn’t matter, teaching the difficult
lesson of love, dwelling on the liturgy of the Church
while the storm rages — the storm will pass. In 1943, the
year of the North African campaign and the final
disaster to the Italian armies, he issued two encyclicals —
on 'The Mystical Body of Jesus Christ’ and on 'Biblical
Studies’. They must have seemed to the Italian people
very far removed from their immediate worries, but those
worries pass, and the subject of the encyclicals goes on
as long as human life.

And yet, one cannot help exclaiming in parentheses, if
only they were more readable: less staid, tight, pedantic
in style. I doubt whether many of the laity read these
encyclicals and yet they are addressed by form 'to all the
clergy and faithful of the Catholic world’. The abstract
words, the sense of distance, the lack of fire make them
rather like a leading article in a newspaper: the words
have been current too long. There are no surprises. 'As
it is by faith that on this earth we adhere to God as the
source of truth, so it is by virtue of Christian hope that
we seek Him as the source of beatitude.’ The words have

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THE PARADOX OF A POPE

no bite, no sting, no concrete image: we feel that a man
is dictating to a dictaphone. Compare the encyclicals with
such writing as St Francis de Sales, using his chaste
elephant or his bees as metaphors, arousing our attention
with a startling image: c My tongue, while I speak of my
neighbour, is in my mouth like a lancet in the hand of the
surgeon, who wishes to make an incision between the
nerves and sinews: the incision that I make with my
tongue must be so exact that I say neither more nor less
than the truth.’ In the encyclicals the incision has not
been made: the words clothe the thought as stiffly as a
plaster cast on an injured limb.

Not all the Popes have been quite so dry or cautious in
their encyclicals — Leo XIII in his Rerum Novarum
wrote with a kind of holy savagery on the abuse of
property (didn’t the Bishop of San Luis Potosi in Mexico
preserve the copies in his cellar till the revolution for fear
of offending the rich?) and Pius XI, attacking the
Hitlerian State in Mit Brennender Sorge , allowed the
personal tone of voice to be heard.

But a Pope — or a saint or a parish priest — is not
necessarily a writer, and in any case many — if not most —
ofPacelli’s encyclicals are not personally written by him-
self, only very carefully revised and approved. (The
comparison with a newspaper article is reasonably apt.
One can always tell for example which leader in the
London Times is written by the Editor : there is a master-
fulness, a lack of caution — not the same as lack of prud-
ence — which appears also in the encyclicals of Pius XI
who was usually his own author.) I express, of course, a
private opinion based on translations. One distinguished
writer has compared the Pope’s style to the Roman
fountains, formal even in their omateness, the Latin

385

25 — C.E.G.G,

SOME CHARACTERS

words, colourless as water but pure and exact, falling
with certainty into the ageless basins — Roman ? Renais-
sance? Is his formality closer perhaps to music than
literature? Bossuet, Dante, St. Augustine — these are
among the very few literary references that occur in his
writing, but he speaks with real understanding of music.
Again one is reminded of many parish priests whose
worldly interests seem narrowed by the love of God to a
few books and the enjoyment of classical music.

This is the essential paradox in a Pope who many
believe will rank among the greatest. By the gossipers of
Rome he is often described as a priest first and a diplomat
afterwards. But how was it with his background that he
did not become a diplomat first and foremost ? He belongs
to an aristocratic Roman family. Although his own in-
clinations seem to have been to ordinary parish work and
to the confessional, he was steered by those who may have
known his talents better, from a very early period in his
life as a priest, towards an official career, first the Con-
gregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, which
is the papal Secretariat of State, under Monsignor Gas-
pari who was to assist Pius XI in framing the Vatican
Treaty. The paradox persisted: Pacelii combined his
official work with pastoral work, just as during his public
audiences he has been known to go into a comer of the
audience hall at a peasant's request and hear his con-
fession.

The steady ecclesiastical career drove on: Papal Nun-
cio in Munich in 191 7 so that he could act as intermediary
for the Pope in his efforts to attain peace (here he saw
violent revolution for the first time when the Communists
broke into his palace) ; in 1920 with the formation of the
German Republic he became Nuncio in Berlin and later

386

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

when Hitler began his campaign for power he main-
tained close ties with the Centre Party. The leader of the
Centre Party, now Monsignor Kaass, has remained the
Pope’s friend, is administrator of St Peter’s and is
responsible for the excavations under the Vatican which
have disclosed the old Roman cemetery where St Peter
was buried. He has built the Pope a private staircase, so
that he can make his way alone into these caverns and
talk to the workmen. Walking with me among his tombs
the Monsignor referred with affection to his friend,
pointing a finger upwards, "him up there’.

In 1929 when Pacelli left Germany the inevitable
Cardinalate followed; the parish priest was doomed, you
would have said, and yet he obstinately stayed alive. We
can hear him speaking in the words of Pacelli’s farewell
so different from the formal encyclicals that were to
follow. "I go the way in which God, by the mouth of the
Pontiff, commands me to go. I go this way fully conscious
of my weakness, believing in Him who uses the weak to
put the strong to shame. What I was, is nothing; what I
am is little; but what I shall become is eternal.’ "What I
shall become.’ As the Pope placed the Red Hat on his
head he spoke the traditional words that in our day have
taken a real significance: "Accept the red hat, a special
sign of the Cardinal’s dignity. This means that you should
be ready to shed your blood and to die, if need be, in the
fearless defence of our Holy Faith, for the preservation
of quiet and peace among the Christian people. . .

Only a month later he was appointed Secretary of
State to Pius XI, perhaps the most politically active Pope
since the Middle Ages, the man who revived the Vatican
State, who fought Mussolini so firmly that Mussolini
rejoiced in public at his death, who began the struggle

387

SOME CHARACTERS

against Hitler not only by his encyclicals but by personal
affront — he left Rome when Hitler came there and closed
the Vatican Museum which Hitler had intended to visit.
On his death bed in February 1939 he finished his last
encyclical — the final words written on the night he died,
his last blow, it was to have been, so they say, at the
Totalitarian State. His successor never issued it.

Yet the new Pope as Secretary of State had been closely
associated with his predecessor’s policy, and his attitude
to affairs in Germany was well known. At a party which
he gave in Rome after his return from Germany, an old
Conservative friend of his, the Marchese Patrizi, was
overheard by him to remark that it was a good thing
Germany had a strong man now who would deal with the
Communists. Cardinal Pacelli turned on him. * For good-
ness’ sake, Joseph, ’ he said, "don’t talk such nonsense.
The Nazis are infinitely worse.’ We can assume therefore
that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were gratified when the
Conclave, breaking a tradition of nearly 300 years, elected
the Secretary of State Pope in March 1939 at the age of
sixty-three. Perhaps the foreign Cardinals turned the
balance in Paceili’s favour. He was almost the only
Cardinal they could have met personally.

For this is another paradox of the Pope — that this
priest, whom I have heard described as a Franciscan by
one who knows him well, is regarded as a very travelled,
very modem man. There are the new gadgets of the
Vatican, from the white typewriter and the white tele-
phone and the electric razor to the short-wave wireless
station and the latest television equipment provided by
an American company. But the television transmitter is
apparently not working very well and the service is
starved for money, while the programmes of the Vatican

388

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

radio are astonishingly uninspired — relays of leaders
from the Qsservatore Romano , local pieces of Catholic
news.

As for travel it is true that Pacelli moved about a good
deal of the earth’s surface before he became Pope, but it
is a reasonable guess that the only two countries that
made any deep impression on him were Germany and
America. For both these countries he has retained great
affection. The administrator of St Peter’s is German and
only recently Cardinal Faulhaber was invited to conse-
crate the new altar of the restored basilica of Constantine
under St Peter’s. As for America his personal feeling of
friendship for Cardinal Spellman seems certain, though
somewhat surprising considering the marked divergency
of their characters (the cynical sometimes point out that
the United States is the only country of importance left
that is able to transmit Peter’s Pence to Rome: the
Catholics of other nations are bound by their currency
laws).

As for his other travels they have been widespread but
brief and filled with the official duties of the Pope’s
representative: to the Eucharistic Congress at Buenos
Aires in 1934; to Lourdes in 1935 on the nineteenth
centenary of the Redemption; to Lisieux during the
Eucharistic Congress in 1937; and to the Congress in
1938 at Budapest. How much during such journeys does
the Pope’s representative see? There is a passage in
Tolstoy’s War and Peace that describes the travels of an
army. C A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne
along by his regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship.
However far he has walked, whatever strange, unknown
and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is always
surrounded by the same decks, masts and rigging of his

389

SOME CHARACTERS

ship, so the soldier always has around him the same
comrades, the same sergeant-major, the same Company
dog, and the same commanders . 5 The Papal Secretary of
State moving from country to country, Eucharistic Con-
gress to Eucharistic Congress, is hemmed in by the pack
wagons of the Church, the dignitaries in skull caps, the
distant crowds that hide by their pious bulk even the
shape of the buildings.

One cannot believe that the journeys of Pacelli have
influenced him much except in so far as they have driven
him to learn many languages. One must not exaggerate
his knowledge, however. We hear the gentle precise
voice speaking to us in English, and we forget the strict
limits of his vocabulary. He sends his blessings to our
families "with deep affection 5 — that is a favourite phrase
often repeated and emphasized — but inevitably he has to
address the pilgrim in certain set formulas.

For the priest this is a smaller handicap than for the
diplomat. A priest in the confessional too is apt to
speak in formulas, but into the straitjacket of a limited
vocabulary some priests are able to introduce an extra-
ordinary intimacy, gentleness, a sense of love. That is
Pius XIFs achievement, if we can call the grace of great
charity an achievement. We become aware that he loves
the world as another man may love his only son. The
enemies whom Pius XI pursued with such vigour, he
fights with the weapon of charity. In his presence one
feels that here is a priest who is waiting patiently for the
moment of martyrdom, and his patience includes even the
long drawn conversations of the nuns who visit him.
From another room one hears the stream of aged feminine
talk while the Monsignors move restlessly in their purple
robes, looking at their watches or making that movement

390

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

of the hand to the chin forming an imaginary beard, that
is the Latin way of exclaiming at a bore. Out comes the
last nun, strutting away with the happy contented smile
of a woman who has said her say and out from his inner
room comes the Pope with his precise vigorous step ready
to greet the next unimportant stranger "with deep
affection".

How endless these audiences must seem to him —
private audiences to diplomats, authors, civil servants,
the people ‘with a pull 5 , public audiences to Italian
cyclists, to actors. Boy Scouts, aircraft engineers, direc-
tors of American companies. Fiat workers, bankers, tram
conductors. We seem to hear a village priest speaking,
rather than the ex-Nuncio to Berlin, the ex-Secretary of
State, when he speaks to the tram conductors and
describes their own troubles to them. "He has to warn
some passengers, to give advice to others, and in selling
the tickets he usually has to give the change — a duty
which complicates things still more. He must see to it
that people enter by the rear door and leave by the front
door and that they observe the smoking regulations."
How long is it since the Pope travelled in a tram ? The
description is so simple that we smile . 4 A duty which com-
plicates things still more . 5 We had not thought of the
complication of change-giving, but the conductors had
and so had the Pope.

One is reminded sometimes in these addresses of the
controversy between Henry James and the popular
Victorian novelist, Walter Besant. Besant had made fun
at the notion of a woman writing a novel about men’s
affairs, and James replied that any girl with sufficient
talent could write a novel about the Brigade of Guards
after once looking through the window of a Mess. It was

391

SOME CHARACTERS

a question of talent, not of knowledge. What is true of
the writer is true of the priest, who from a hint in the
confessional has to build his knowledge of a whole world
outside his experience, and one finds in these private
addresses of the Pope — what one seldom finds in the
encyclicals — an intuitive genius. For example here is this
celibate, this hermit buried in the Vatican cave, addressing
a special audience of newly married couples on the heroic
energy required in everyday life, the boredoms and
frustrations and tom nerves of two people living under
one roof. ‘When one should remember during a chilly
dispute that it is better to keep quiet, to keep in check a
complaint, or to use a milder word instead of a stronger,
because one knows that the stronger word, once it is out,
will relieve, it is true, the tension of the irritated nerves,
but will also leave its darkening shadow behind/

Many soldiers, Allied and German, Protestants, athe-
ists, Jews, had their audiences with the Pope during the
war. The neutrality of the Vatican was rigidly guarded:
Rome was protected from the Allies as from the Germans
to the best of the Pope’s ability, but soldiers of all sides
were welcome as pilgrims. Many stories have been told of
these wartime audiences. Here is one more.

While a London priest was making his rounds in his
parish a year or two ago, a working man shouted to him
from across the road that * his bloody Pope 5 was the greatest
man alive. The priest, who supposed the man was drunk,
stopped and spoke to him since the view he had expressed
was hardly common in that area. The man told him that
he had lost his only son in the war and that they had been
very attached to one another. The thought that he would
never see his son again was driving him crazy, for he had
no religious frith to help him. He was in the army and

392

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

went to the Vatican with a military party to see the Pope.
As the Pope moved amongst them* chatting to this man
and that, the father shouted after him. The Pope asked
him what he wanted and he said that he wanted to know
if there was any hope of his seeing his son again. The
Pope replied that that was one of those short questions
which required a long answer. He told one of the attend-
ants to bring the man after the audience to his private
room. There he sat down and for an hour explained the
reasons for believing in the immortality of the soul. The
man left the Pope convinced that he would see his son
again and happy in the knowledge.

This is the Pope whom most of us before the war
regarded as a diplomat. Even his photographs, where
the eyes have lost expression behind deep glasses, where
the lips keep their thinness and lose their sensitivity, add
to the impression of an ex-Secretary of State. It is true
he keeps that office still in his own hands, assisted by
Monsignor Montini,* but one who has had close dealings
with the Pope, denied to me that diplomacy was import-
ant in his eyes. This is not a world where diplomatic
action counts for much. In the last thirty years the Pope
has seen the consistent failure of diplomacy, but it is a
world he once knew well — the world of ambassadors and
visiting Ministers — and he retains these contacts in his
own hands much as a man keeps the trophies on his wall
of a sport long abandoned. The world cannot be saved by
diplomacy.

What can save it?

So much time for audiences public and private, so
much time for work (the light in his study over St Peter’s
bums till one in the morning), so much time like any

* Now Pope Paul VI.

393

SOME CHARACTERS

other priest for his breviary, and in the background one
is aware of the huge threatening world, the conferences in
Moscow, the speeches at Lake Success, the troops pour-
ing down in Korea, big business bulling and bearing in
the skyscrapers of Wall Street. He presses into one more
visitor’s hand a little green envelope with the Papal arms
containing a small nickel holy medal. Can this Thing —
so defenceless it seems — survive ?

Every morning at breakfast the Pope lets loose his two
canaries and his favourite bird — a small bird with a green
breast, I don’t know its name. They walk over the table
pecking at his butter, and his favourite takes crumbs
from between his fingers and perches on the white
shoulder. ‘He talks to children’, my informant said, c as
though they were his birds and to his birds, as though
they were children . . That was why he called the Pope
Franciscan, and the Franciscans next to the Jesuits are
his favourite Order. Even in this short period of relaxa-
tion he seems to be making a hieratic gesture symbolizing
charity. If a man loves enough, every act will represent
his love.

I have said he gives the impression of a man patiently
waiting for martyrdom. He has already barely escaped it.
At his coronation, the German ambassador was heard to
remark, ‘Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the
last’, and a moment came during the war, under the
German Occupation, when the end was expected. Hitler
was said to have uttered the threat that he would raze the
Vatican to the ground, and it is certainly true that the
administrator received orders one day from ‘him up
there’ to produce a plan for summoning the ambassadors
of the powers at a moment’s notice to St Peter’s so that
the Pope if necessary might make an announcement of

394

THE PARADOX OF A POPE

grave importance. But the threat of exile or death passed :
the order was revoked. Now again the danger threatens.
The Church’s borders are widespread, in Poland and
Korea, but war travels fast these days. Hitler was handi-
capped by the presence of the Church in Germany: in
Russia the Church is represented only by a few priests in
hiding.

Sometimes a Pope can be known by the saints he
canonizes. Pius XI, the pugnacious priest, canonized
Thomas More and John Fisher, over-ruling the require-
ments of miracles : they were men who fought the totali-
tarian state of their day. Pacelli has canonized the child
Maria Goretti, who died forgiving her murderer.

It is a long time since a Pope has awoken, even in those
of other faiths, such a sense of closeness. One remembers
Henry James’s description of Pius IX among his guards
coming up the Via Condotti in his great rumbling black-
horsed coach ‘so capacious that the august personage
within — a hand of automatic benediction, a large, hand-
some, pale old face, a pair of celebrated eyes which one
took, on trust, for sinister — could show from it as en-
shrined in the dim depths of a chapel 5 .

Pius XII gives no automatic benediction, though there
are still dim depths, one feels, in the Vatican, in spite of
the Roman sunshine glinting on the orders andtheswords,
as one is sieved from one audience chamber to another by
scarlet flunkeys, who will later grab the guileless visitor
and extort the money for drinks. The huge civil service
has to go on functioning, and sometimes in our irritation
at its slowness, its caution, or its pedantry, we may fed
that it is obscuring the white-clothed figure at the centre.
But a feeling like this comes and goes : it is not the impres-
sion that remains.

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SOME CHARACTERS

One visitor replying to a polite formal enquiry of the
Pope said that there were two Masses he would always
remember: one was at 5.30 in the morning at a side altar,
in a small Franciscan monastery in Apulia, the Host
raised in Padre Pio’s hands marked with the black ugly
dried patches of the stigmata: the other was the Pope’s
Jubilee Mass in Rome, the enormous crowd pressed into
St Peter’s, and men and women cheering and weeping as
the Pope passed up the nave, boys flinging their Scout
hats into the air: the fine transparent features like those
on a coin going by, the hand raised in a resolute blessing,
the smile of 4 deep affection’, and later the Pope alone at
the altar, when the Cardinals who served him had stepped
aside, moving with grace and precision through the
motions of the Mass, doing what every priest does every
day, the servant of the servants of God, and not impos-
sibly, one feels, a saint.

But howmuch more difficult sanctity must be under the
Michelangelo frescoes, among the applauding crowds,
through the daily audiences with the bicyclists and the
tram conductors, the nuns and the ambassadors, than in
the stony fields of Apulia where Pio is confined. It is the
strength of the Church in Italy that it can produce such
extremes, and exactly the same thought came to one
kneeling among a dozen women one early morning in the
Franciscan monastery, and pressed among the cheering
crowds in St Peter’s. It was not after all the question, can
this Thing survive? it was, how can this Thing ever be
defeated?

195 *

396

3. EIGHTY YEARS ON THE
BARRACK SQUARE

This book is hardly more for general reading than is a
Manual of Infantry Training: the comparison is not too
loosely made.* Here and there, as I hope to show, flashes
of illumination occur, phrases typical of the old man we
learned to love, but the greater part of the book, begun
when Angelo Roncalii was fourteen years old at the minor
seminary of Bergamo and concluded in 1962, a year before
the Pope’s death, is a record of retreats, spiritual exercises,
meditations.

It begins with a section called "Rules of Life to be
observed by young men who wish to make progress in
the life of piety and study’ and it ends in old age with a
section "Summary of great graces bestowed on a man
who thinks poorly of himself’. Open the book at random
anywhere and you may be discouraged: ‘I will observe
the greatest caution and reserve in my conversation,
especially when speaking of others. Free and open-
hearted, yes ! but always with prudence ’ (age twenty-two,
a seminarist in Rome); "Know how to preserve silence,
how to speak with moderation, how to refrain from
judging people and their attitudes, except when this is an
obligation imposed by Superiors, or for grave reasons’
(age sixty-four. Papal Nuncio in France).

How dull it often seems, this long discipline on the
barrack-square from boyhood to old age, and then sud-
denly a phrase occurs, not couched in the terms of the
King’s Regulations, and we are in the presence of the
saint we knew, with his genius for simplicity — "I really
need a good box on the ears’, "I have always been a bit
crazy, a bit of a numskull, and more than ever so in
* Journal of a Soul: Diary of Pope John XXIII

397

SOME CHARACTERS

recent days. This is all my virtue amounts to ! 5 He was
still the raw recruit aged eighteen, when he wrote that,
but surely there has seldom been so unchanging a char-
acter from youth to age. He describes, at a much later
period, his imagination as 4 the crazy inmate of the house %
and he seems always to have been aware of a kind of
divine folly. He is Patriarch of Venice when he writes:
‘ I would not mind being thought a fool if this could help
people to understand what I firmly believe/

I found it a great aid in reading the Journal to con-
centrate on certain threads which run throughout: one
thread was the sense of time passing. When Roncalli was
elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven he had no illu-
sion about the motive of the Conclave (‘everyone was
convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional
Pope’), but the sense of so much to do and so little time
frightened him not at all, for that sense had always been
there — ‘the crazy inmate 5 had seen to that. ‘Time is run-
ning out. Today at twenty-one I must start at the begin-
ning again’, and in his fiftieth year, ‘Everything to be
done at once, speedily and well; no waiting about, no
putting lesser things before the more important.’

No wonder that there is an exultant note in his eightieth
year — the exercises have borne fruit, the barrack square
had been no wasted ordeal, he was prepared. ‘Here I am,
already on the eve of the fourth year of my pontificate,
with an immense programme of work in front of me to be
carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is
watching and waiting . 5

Another thread I found it fascinating to pursue through
the retreats and the formal conventional meditations is
the presentation of his own faults. In what he considered
his faults we see so often indications of the man we loved.

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EIGHTY YEARS ON THE BARRACK SQUARE

T am really very greedy about fruit. I must beware, I
must watch myself.’ ‘I tend to linger too long in the
kitchen after supper, talking things over with my family.’
‘The longing to read newspapers.’ ‘Excessive mirth’
(all these at the age of seventeen) ; and at nineteen ‘all the
words, the witticisms prompted only by a secret desire to
show off how much I have studied, all my castles in the
air, my castles of straw and castles in Spain’. (How many
are praying now that the Vatican Council will not prove
to be one of these ?)

A little later, ‘As regards purity ... I do not feel any
strong temptations contrary to this virtue — yet I must
confess that I have two eyes in my head which want to
look at more than they should.’ (He had a certain fear of
women only possible for a man of normal passions, and
he noted with relief in 1940, ‘Advancing years, when one
is in the sixties like me, wither the evil impulses to some
extent, and it is a real pleasure to observe the silence and
tranquillity of the flesh.’) As for some of his other young
faults, they amuse us and sometimes surprise us: ‘the
rather mischievous expression’ (that surely he never
lost), ‘the affected gesture, the furtive glance, that
strutting about like a professor, that carefully-studied
composure of manner, with the well-fitting cassock, the
fashionable shoes . .

There are a few pages in this book which, I think, all
readers of any creed will find profoundly moving. They
describe the day of Roncalli’s ordination as a priest in
Rome. The ceremony is over, he has written to his
family, and now in his joy he cannot stay indoors.

‘I went out. Utterly absorbed in my Lord, as if there
were no one else in Rome. I visited the churches to which

399

SOME CHARACTERS

I was most devoted* the altars of my most familiar saints*
the images of Our Lady. They were very short visits. It
seemed that evening as if I had something to say to all
those holy ones and as if every one of them had something
to say to me. And indeed it was so. 5

Someone else* too* had spoken to him that day* and
history contains few more touching scenes than this en-
counter between a young priest of twenty-three* who was
to become the great Pope John* and Pius X, who was to
become Saint Pius.

‘The Pope then* still bending down* placed his hand
on my head* and speaking almost into my ear said : “ Well
done, well done, my boy . . . this is what I like to hear*
and I will ask the good Lord to grant a special blessing
on these good intentions of yours* so that you may really
be a priest after his own heart. I bless all your other
intentions too* and all the people who are rejoicing at this
time for your sake. 55 He blessed me and gave me his hand
to kiss. He passed on and spoke to someone else, a Pole*
I believe : but all at once* as if following his own train of
thought, he turned back to me and asked when I should
be back at my home. I told him: “For the feast of
Assumption. 55 “Ah* what a feast that will be* 55 he said*
“up there in your little hamlet (he had earlier asked me
where I came from)* and how those fine Bergamasque
bells will peal out on that day 1 55 and he continued his
round smiling. 5

The illustrations are many and satisfying, one in
particular. Pope John is caught by the camera talking to a

400

EIGHTY YEARS ON THE BARRACK SQUARE

little girl sick with leukemia — he speaks with extreme
gravity and she listens with the same deep seriousness. It
is impossible to say which of them is the elder, which will
be the first dead. He speaks to her as to an equal.

1965

26—— C.E.O.G.

401

THREE REVOLUTIONARIES

i. THE MAN AS PURE AS LUCIFER
Throughout the French war there was a school of
thought which believed Ho Chi Minh to be dead, so
unwilling were those who had encountered him in 1945
and 1946 to believe that he was a genuine Communist.
One of Ho Chi Minh’s strongest opponents in the south
had described him to me with unwilling admiration. Un
homme pur comme Lucifer .

When I met him* (I had guaranteed that I would not
publish the details of our conversation) it was in a small
room in Bao Dai’s former palace, over a cup of tea, and I
could not believe him to be a figurehead. Another
Minister was present, but a Minister known to be efface .
He was there only because I had asked to see him, and he
sat silent like a small boy so long as Ho Chi Minh was
with us.

Dressed in khaki drill, with thick dark woollen socks
falling over his ankles, Ho Chi Minh gave an impression
of simplicity and candour, but overwhelmingly of leader-
ship. There was nothing evasive about him: this was a
man who gave orders and expected obedience and also
love. The kind, remorseless face had no fanaticism about
it. A man is a fanatic about a mystery — tablets of stone, a
voice from a burning bush — but this was a man who had
patiently solved an equation. So much love had to be
given and received, so many sacrifices demanded and
suffered. Everything had contributed to the solution: a
merchant ship, the kitchens of the Carlton Grill, a photo-
grapher’s studio in Paris, a British prison in Hongkong,
as well as Moscow in the hopeful spring days of the
Revolution, the company of Borodin in China.

* Written in 1955.

402

THE MAN AS PURE AS LUCIFER

‘ Let us speak as though we are at home/ he said > and I
wondered whether it was in the Carlton Grill that he had
learnt his easy colloquial English (only once did he fumble
for a word). I am on my guard against hero-worship, but
he appealed directly to that buried relic of the schoolboy.
When he put on his glasses to read a paper, bending a
little down and sideways, shifting his English cigarette
in long, bony, graceful fingers, the eyes twinkling at some
memory I had stirred, I was reminded of a Mr Chips,
wise, kind, just (if one could accept the school rules as
just), prepared to inflict sharp punishment without undue
remorse (and punishment in this adult school has lasting
effect), capable of inspiring love. I regretted I was too old
to accept the rules or believe what the school taught.

He was working fourteen hours a day, but there was
no sign of fatigue. He got up to return to work (the
National Assembly was meeting the next day), and his
socks flapped as he waved back at me from the doorway,
telling me not to hurry, to stay as long as I liked, to have
another cup of tea. I could imagine them flapping all
across the school quad, and I could understand the loyalty
of his pupils.

There was sadness and decay, of course, in Hanoi, as
there couldn’t help being in a city emptied of all the well-
to-do. For such as I there was sadness in the mere lack of
relaxation : nothing in the cinemas but propaganda films,
the only restaurants prohibitive in price, no cafe in which
to while away the hours watching people pass. But the
peasant doesn’t miss the cafe, the restaurant, the French
or the American film — he’s never had them. Perhaps
even the endless compulsory lectures and political meet-
ings, the hours of physical training, are better entertain-
ment than he has ever known.

403

SOME CHARACTERS

We talk so glibly of the threat to the individual, but the
anonymous peasant has never been treated so like an
individual before. Unless a priest, no one before the
Commissar has approached him, has troubled to ask him
questions, or spent time in teaching him. There is some-
thing in Communism besides the politics.

I thought with more sympathy now of the southern
President Diem, for in Saigon where there is nothing
else but politics he represents at least an idea of patriot-
ism. He has some words in common with Ho Chi Minh,
as Catholicism has some words in common with Com-
munism, but he is separated from the people by cardinals
and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers
droning of global strategy, when he should be walking
in the rice-fields unprotected, learning the hard way how
to be loved and obeyed — the two cannot be separated.

One pictured him there in the Norodom Palace, sitting
with his blank, brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-
advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by
his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting
for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait
is the Patriot Ruined by the West.

1955

404

2. THE MARXIST HERETIC

They seek him here ,

They seek him there . . .

Those Yanquis seek kirn everywhere.

Is he in heaven or is he in hell . . . ?

No one since the Scarlet Pimpernel has been so "dem-
ned’ elusive as Fidel (whom no Cuban except an enemy
calls by the name of Castro). He will see you, if that is his
wish, in his own good time and in his chosen place, but
there will never — that is certain — be a rendezvous appoint-
ed for eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning in an office
on such and such a floor in Havana. For one thing he is
seldom in Havana. Cuba is a country now and not merely
a pleasure-capital as it was in Batista’s day. The new
apartment prepared for Fidel in the palace of the revolu-
tion holds small attraction for him, with the exception of
the big toy installed there, a map of Cuba as big as a
billiard table with a great switch-board enabling him to
illuminate the grazing areas, the areas of sugar, coffee,
tobacco. This agricultural landscape is his home.*

Once we nearly stumbled on him on the Isla Turigu-
ano, the state farm in Las Villas surrounded on three
sides by marshes — an island of prize cattle, prize horses,
and prize pigs. We had arrived at the cowboys’ motel in
the evening, but we were a day late by our schedule (cars
have a way of shedding parts after seven years’ hard use),
and Fidel had left that morning. At Moron we arrived at
mid-day to find that he had passed the night there and
moved on somewhere else. In Camaguey they knew
nothing of his movements at the Party headquarters, but
the secretary significantly was absent "somewhere’, and
Fidel appeared in Camaguey soon after we left. He was
* Written in 1966.

405

SOME CHARACTERS

always ahead of us or behind us as we drove East to
Santiago and Guantanamo.

On the second night of my arrival in Cuba* I watched
him as he made one of his marathon speeches (four hours
without a note) to the Congress of the Trade Unions.
Knowing little Spanish I observed his physical per-
formance rather than listened to his speech. I could have
divided it like a play into acts: in the first act he was a
grave formidable figure, almost motionless at the podium,
the word conciencia chimed in his sentences. Then sud-
denly all changed to comedy and farce, as he imitated the
ignorant member of a political cadre, c No se\ c No sed He
began to play with his six microphones, touching, shifting,
aligning them as though they were flowers; he knew
exactly which one of them, if he bent above it, would
emphasize best a purr, a laugh, an angry sneer, a humor-
ous imitation. The arms moved all the time now, as he
mimicked, play-acted, plucked laughter out of his audi-
ence. c There is no people more sensitive to ridicule than
here.’ He savaged Senor Frei of Chile: you could almost
see the poor man’s corpse slung over his shoulder.

After this speech he vanished into the countryside as
effectively as he had vanished ten years ago from Batista’s
troops and planes into the forests of the Sierra Maestre.
But not till ten days later would reports and photographs
of his travels appear in Granma — the daily paper with
what seems to be an odd nursery title until you remember
that Granma was the boat which brought him and his
eighty-three revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba —
seventy-one were dead or captured in the first week — to
overthrow Batista’s dictatorship.

This elusiveness is, of course, partly a matter of secur-
ity. A gunman would find it difficult to choose the right

406

THE MARXIST HERETIC

spot at the right time, and in one of the last plots against
his life, betrayed by a double agent in the C.I.A., the
would-be assassins made a ruthless plan to ensure his
presence at a given place at a given time. They began to
shadow the car of Haydee Santamaria on her way home
from work in the Casa America where she is in charge
of relations with the Communist parties of Latin America.
Her death, they believed, would lead them to Fidel.

There are three principal heroines of the revolution:
Celia Sanchez, who in 1956 awaited Fidel in the Sierra
Maestre, Vilma Espin, who fought with Raul Castro in
Oriente and later married him, and Haydee Santamaria.
Haydee (her surname is no more used than Fidel’s)
fought in the unsuccessful attack on Moncada Barracks
in Santiago in 1953. Her brother was killed there and his
eyes tom out, her fiance was killed and his testicles cut
off, and the bodies were shown her in the prison. Four
years later, married to Armando Hart, she fought in the
Sierra. (I met her first in 1957 when she and her husband
were hiding in a safe-house in Santiago on their way to
the mountains.) If the assassins had succeeded in killing
her, she would inevitably have been buried in the heroes’
pantheon, and her funeral would have been a rendezvous
they could be certain Fidel would keep. But she noticed
the lights of the following car and took evasive action.

So there is reason enough for Fidel to make few
appointments for fixed hours and to be notoriously un-
punctual at his public appearances (on August 29 the
curtain rose on the C.T.C. Congress an hour late). But
his enemies come only from outside. He has no cause to
fear an unpremeditated attack. The nation is a nation in
arms, and no tyrant could long survive his constant
journeys through the countryside. But the paramount

407

SOME CHARACTERS

motive for his travels is not personal safety; he is dis-
covering his own country for the first time, with a sense
of excitement over the smallest details. In his speech to
the Trade Union delegates he said: e I have never learnt
as much as I have when talking with workers, students,
and peasants. I have passed through two universities in
my life: one where I learnt nothing, one where I have
learnt all that I know." He is a Chestertonian man who
travels towards home as though it were to a foreign
land.

I was more fortunate than many my last night in
Cuba, for a messenger came to fetch me from dinner and
I was able to spend the early hours with him in a house
on the outskirts of Havana. As soon as we sat down, Fidel
began to describe to me, compulsively as though he
needed a stranger in order to taste the pleasure of re-
counting his story again, how on his last journey he had
entered a small pueblo after dark and noticed there were
no lights in the streets — only in the house of the Party.
In a bar two men sat playing dominoes and he sat down
with them and joined the game. The rumour of his
presence spread and the villagers gathered. They deman-
ded a speech. (I was reminded how an intellectual had
told me that in 1965, the bad year of drought and political
uncertainty, Fidel had not spoken once between July 26,
the National Day, and October, and how people had
become nervous and unsettled by his silence.) In this
pueblo he told them he would return another day to
speak: now he wanted to ask questions . . . the shrewd
humorous Socratic eyes looked me quickly over ... he
discovered why there were no lights in the street, how
far a man had to walk to get his shoes repaired, how
deeply dependent they were upon a town some fifteen

408

THE MARXIST HERETIC

kilometres away . . . they were small details, probably
familiar to any country dweller, but most of his adult
years have been spent in war, prison or exile. Now at
forty he is really beginning to live. I had sometimes
wondered how he would fare with the heroic days in the
Sierra Maestre over, but perhaps the heroic days for him
are only just beginning.

He spoke about that pueblo for more than half an hour :
I would interrupt with a question and he would stop in
mid-sentence, replying quickly and without hesitation,
then pick up the unfinished phrase exactly where it had
been left. He would change in a flash from the sly humo-
rous observer to the enthusiast. If I had not missed him
in the Isla Turiguano, if I had been with him in the
country, I would have seen what he saw, I would have
been present at the birth of his idea. It had come to him
suddenly there, over the dominoes ....

He intended to make an experiment in this remote
pueblo. The inhabitants would be removed from their
dependence on the town. Everything they needed would
be provided free of charge. Their houses would be free
(already in his speech of August 29 he had foreseen the
universal abolition of rents in 1970), they already had a
primary school — a secondary school would be built, they
would have their own generator of electricity, there would
be a nursery for the children and a communal restaurant
free of charge which would relieve the women of most
work in the home ( c In my opinion this will help many
marriages to last ’), there would be a free cinema twice a
week, a cobbler cobbling free. Money would not be
abolished, but the need of money would practically
disappear. Socialism in one country had been tried else-
where. This would be Communism in one pueblo.

409

SOME CHARACTERS

Sociologists and psychologists would watch the experi-
ment. How would the people use their greater leisure ?
Would productivity rise or fall ? And if the experiment
didn’t work ? If productivity didn’t rise ? c We shall have
to think again.’ How seldom have Communist leaders
allowed that degree of doubt in any plan ?

Fidel is a Marxist, but an empirical Marxist, who plays
Communism by ear and not by book. Speculation to him
is more important than dogma, and he rejoices in the
name of heretic. £ We belong to no sect, we belong to no
international freemasonry, to no church. We are heretics,
yes, heretics — fine, let them call us heretics.’ And again
in the same speech: c If there exists a Marxist-Leninist
party which knows by heart all the £C Dialectic of History ”
and everything written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and
still does not do a damned thing about it, are others
obliged to wait and not make revolution ? ’ He sees Com-
munism elsewhere becoming conservative and bureau-
cratic — revolution dying on an office desk within tightly
drawn national frontiers. (I suggested to him that Russia
was now nearer to a managerial revolution than a
Communist one. He had not read James Burnham’s book,
but a note was made to buy it.)

In his turn he listened, with sympathy, while I argued
for the possibility, not of a mere chilly co-existence, but
of cooperation between Catholicism and Communism.
On both sides the philosophy of Marx forms a wide area
of disagreement, but this man will never allow a nine-
teenth-century philosophy to stand between him and any
action to advance the economic aims of Communism. Of
the Papal Nuncio in Cuba he spoke in terms of warm
friendship and respect. Just across the water He the great
impoverished areas of South America — poverty and

410

THE MARXIST HERETIC

riches in revolutionary juxtaposition — vast opportunities
for Communist expansion denied to Russia in Europe.
Catholicism in Cuba has always been a religion of the
bourgeoisie and so without deep roots : the religion of the
peasant is Afro- Christian — Ogoune and Erzulie and
Legba share their altars as in Haiti with a Christian god.
But in South America, with the possible exception of
Brazil, the Catholic Church is the natural religion of the
peasant, and if Communism is to be imported from
Cuba, Fidel will not appear in South America as the
persecutor of the Church. Nor would it be his wish. The
enemies of the Church in Cuba are not the Communist
leaders: they are Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Sheean,
those doughty champions of cold war and counter-
revolution, churchmen for whom Pope John XXIII
seems to have lived in vain.

As Russia drifts towards state capitalism and China
towards some fantastic variant of her own ( Granma has
been mercilessly funny about the cult of Mao Tse Tung),
Cuba may well become the real testing ground of Com-
munism. There is something of the Athenian forum here
— the island is small enough for the people to be con-
sulted, informed, confided in: they can see their leaders
day by day in the streets of their towns and villages.
Those four-hour speeches of Fidel are not made up of
evasions and oratorical tricks and big abstract words —
they are full of information, down to earth, filled with
detail; from them we learn the worst, more than from
any enemy, because he trusts his people — the c appalling ?
situation in Moa, the lack of sewerage in Nueva Geron.
His speeches are nearer to Cobbett than Churchill and in
my opinion the greater for that. The enormous will to
educate is there, as in the new schools and technical

SOME CHARACTERS

colleges which are transforming the countryside. Nor
does Fidel lay down decisions already taken: he announ-
ces mistakes, he describes dreams which may later prove
to be mistakes : he is the revolutionary brain visibly in
action, like one of those glass-sided clocks in which you
can see the wheels in motion. A girl said to me with
excited anticipation as Fidel began to speak on August
29; 4 We never know what he may say.’ The same is
hardly true of our politicians.

This man, so Pauline in his labours and in his escapes
from suffering and death, has a quality of generosity which
calls for loyalty. (Of the original twelve followers who
reached the Sierra Maestre two have died but none has
defected.) A young minister, at the time in charge of
agriculture, made a bad administrative blunder which
deprived Havana temporarily of milk. Fidel told him that
if he respected himself he would go into voluntary exile
to the Isle of Pines. He went for six months and worked
there on a farm. ‘What would have happened,’ I asked,
‘if you had not gone ?’ ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘but I would
have felt outside the revolution.’

‘All nerves are strung for the future, and prepared to
enjoy the present’. Sir Walter Scott wrote of a very
different revolution. ‘All?’ no, not all. Two American
planes a day coming from Miami arrive at Veradero, the
holiday resort outside Havana, and are filled with refu-
gees who are brought to the airport in Leyland buses.
Twice a week the Iberian airlines, which have arrived in
Havana almost empty, depart with every seat filled, both
first class and tourist. Anyone not of military age (else
young Cubans might be called up for the army in Viet-
nam) is free to leave with one bundle or suitcase. A
sympathetic visitor like myself lives, of course, in the

412

THE MARXIST HERETIC

bright sunlight of the revolution; these Cubans who have
chosen exile must have seen the shadows, some of them
perhaps imaginary, some of them real enough.

19 66

4 I 3

3. THE SPY

Espionage today is really a branch of psychological
warfare. The main objective is to sow mistrust between
allies in the enemy’s camp. Fuchs and Nunn May may have
enabled Russia to advance their manufacture of atomic
bombs by a few years, but sooner or later in any case the
Soviet would have reached sufficient parity in the ability
to destroy the world, and the interval, whether short or
long, contained no real danger. The West, after the trau-
matic shock of Hiroshima, was not prepared to make
another unilateral atomic attack.

The real value of the two scientists to the Soviet was
not the benefit they received from their scientific infor-
mation but from their capture, and the breakdown in
Anglo-American relations which followed. A spy allowed
to continue his work without interference is far less
dangerous than the spy who is caught. How right SIS
was to defend Philby and how wrong MI5 to force him
into the open. The West suffered more from his flight
than from his espionage.

I sometimes like to imagine what would have occurred
if Kim Philby had in fact, as many foretold, become C,
the Chief of the Secret Service. The kind of information
he would have had at his disposal as C could hardly have
increased greatly in interest, and it might even have
diminished: no nuts and bolts, only the minutes of great
vacuous high-level conferences. The moment would
certainly have arrived sooner or later when the KGB
thought it time to arrange a tip-off to MI5, followed by
C’s successful flight and the world’s laughter.

Since espionage has taken to psychological warfare, it
has taken, too, to literature, so that it is just as well to
examine carefully any spy memoirs. All the same My

414

SOME CHARACTERS

his faith, nor the evil done by some of his leaders. If there
was a Torquemada now, he would have known in his
heart that one day there would be a John XXIII. £ It can-
not be very surprising that I adopted a Communist view
point in the Thirties; so many of my contemporaries
made the same choice. But many of those who made
their choice in those days changed sides when some of
the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I
stayed the course % Philby writes, and he demands fairly
enough what alternative there could possibly be in the
bad Baldwin-Chamberlain era. T saw the road leading
me into the political position of the querulous outcast, of
the Koestler-Crankshaw-Muggeridge variety, railing at
the movement that had let me down, at the God that had
failed me. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative
it might have been/

His account of the British Secret Service is devasta-
tingly true. ‘The ease of my entry surprised me. It
appeared later that the only enquiry made into my past
was the routine reference to MI5, who passed my name
through their records and came back with the laconic
statement: “Nothing recorded Against”.’ (He was
luckier than I was. I had a police record, for in a libel
action brought against me by Miss Shirley Temple the
papers had been referred to the Director of Public
Prosecutions, and the trace had therefore to be submitted
to C himself.) There was even a moment when Philby
wondered whether it really was the Secret Service which
he had entered. His first factual reports inclined his
Soviet contact to the view that he had got into the wrong
organization.

His character studies are admirable if unkind. Don’t
talk to me of ghost writers : only Philby could have been

416

THE SPY

responsible for these. Anyone who was in Section V will
agree with his estimate of its head, Felix Cowgill, whom
he was to displace. c Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He
was one of those pure souls who denounce ail opponents
as “ politicians”/ The Deputy Chief of the Secret
Service is immediately recognizable. ‘ Vivian was long
past his best — if, indeed, he had ever had one. He had
a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and
wet eyes.’ To C himself, Brigadier Menzies, Philby is
unexpectedly kind, though perhaps the strict limitations
of his praise and a certain note of high patronage would not
have endeared the portrait to the subject. For Skardon,
the MI5 interrogator who broke Fuchs down, he has a
true craftsman's respect.

If this book required a sub-title I would suggest: The
Spy as Craftsman. No one could have been a better chief
than Kim Philby when he was in charge of the Iberian
section of V. He worked harder than anyone and never
gave the impression of labour. He was always relaxed,
completely unflappable. He was in those days, of course,
fighting the same war as his colleagues: the extreme
strain must have come later, when he was organizing a
new section to counter Russian espionage, but though
then he was fighting quite a different war, he maintained
his craftsman's pride. He was determined that his new
section should be organized better than any other part of
the ramshackle SIS. c By the time our final bulky report
was ready for presentation to the Chief, we felt we had
produced the design of something like a service, with
enough serious inducements to tempt able young men to
regard it as a career for life. 5 He set about recruiting with
care and enthusiasm. c The important thing was to get
hold of the good people while they were still available.

27— C.E.G.G.

417

SOME CHARACTERS

With peacetime economies already in sight, it would be
much easier to discard surplus staff than to find people
later to fill in any gaps that might appear." No Soviet
contact this time would be able to wonder whether he
had penetrated the right outfit. A craftsman’s pride, yes,
and of course something else. Only an efficient section
could thoroughly test the security of the Russian service.
It was a fascinating manoeuvre, though only one side
knew that it was a mock war.

The story of how, to attain his position, he eliminated
Cowgill makes, as he admits, for ‘sour reading, just as it
makes sour writing" — one feels for a moment the sharp
touch of the icicle in the heart. I saw the beginning of
this affair — indeed I resigned rather than accept the
promotion which was one tiny cog in the machinery of
his intrigue. I attributed it then to a personal drive for
power, the only characteristic in Philby which I thought
disagreeable. I am glad now that I was wrong. He was
serving a cause and not himself, and so my old liking for
him comes back, as I remember with pleasure those long
Sunday lunches at St Albans when the whole sub-section
relaxed under his leadership for a few hours of heavy
drinking, and later the meetings over a pint on fire-
watching nights at the pub behind St James’s Street. If
one made an error of judgement he was sure to minimize
it and cover it up, without criticism, with a halting stam-
mered witticism. He had all the small loyalties to his
colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to
us. I find it not the least admirable of Philby’s human
qualities that for all those dangerous years he put up
with Burgess, without nerve or humour failing him, or
his affection.

Some years later, after his clearance by Macmillan in
418

THE SPY

the House of Commons, I and another old friend of Kim
were together in Crowborough and we thought to look
him up. There was no sign of any tending in the over-
grown garden and no answer to the bell when we rang.
We looked through the windows of the ugly sprawling
Edwardian house, on the borders of Ashdown forest, in
this poor man’s Surrey. The post hadn’t been collected
for a long time — the floor under the door was littered
with advertising brochures. In the kitchen there were
some empty milk bottles, and a single dirty cup and
saucer in the sink. It was more like an abandoned gypsy
encampment than the dwelling of a man with wife and
children. We didn’t know it, but he had already left: for
Beirut — the last stage of his journey to Moscow, the
home which he had never seen. After thirty years in the
underground surely he had earned his right to a rest.

1968

419

[41

PORTRAIT OF A MAIDEN LADY

Reading No Place Like Home by Beverley Nichols I
found myself thinking of Guy Walsingham, the author
of Obsessions, in Henry James’s The Death of a Lion . It
will be remembered how Mr Morrow , of The Tatler,
interviewed her, for Guy Walsingham was a woman, just
as Dora Forbes, author of The Other Way Round , was a
man, ‘A mere pseudonym 5 — that was how Mr Morrow
put it — 4 convenient you know, for a lady who goes in for
the larger latitude . 5

A confusing literary habit, which led me to wonder a
little about the author of No Place Like Home . For all I
know Mr Nichols may be another Mr Walsingham. A
middle-aged and maiden lady, so I picture the author,
connected in some way with the Church : I would hazard
a guess that she housekeeps for her brother, who may be
a canon or perhaps a rural dean. In that connexion she
may have met the distinguished ecclesiastics who have
noticed a previous book so kindly. ("The chapter on Sex 5 ,
writes a dean, "is the best sermon on the subject I have
ever read. 5 ) She is not married, that I am sure, for she
finds the sight of men’s sleeping apparel oddly disturbing:
4 It was almost indecent, the way he took out pyjamas and
shook them 5 , and on her foreign holiday, described in
this book, she hints — quite innocently — at a Man. fi His
knowledge was encyclopaedic. His name was Paul. He
was about forty-five. We had better leave it at that . 5

It is impossible not to grow a litde fond of this senti-
mental, whimsical, and poetic lady. She conforms so
beautifully to type (I picture her in rather old-fashioned
mauve with a whale-bone collar) : Christian, but only in
the broadest sense, emotional, uninstructed, and a little

420

PORTRAIT OF A MAIDEN LADY

absurd, as when she writes of the Garden of Gethsemane :
‘Here I had the greatest shock of ail. For the Garden was
not even weeded / 5 She is serious about Art (‘Try a little
experiment. Hold up your hand in front of your eyes so
that you bisect a picture horizontally 5 ), a little playful
(‘Differs so great that you felt you must walk up to them
on tip-toe 5 ). She loves dumb animals, and hates to see
even a field mouse killed (‘One mustn't let oneself
wonder if perhaps the mice were building a house, which
has now been wrecked, if perhaps Mrs Field Mouse was
going to have babies, which will be fatherless 5 ), and in
their cause she shows considerable courage. (‘On more
than one occasion I have created useless and undignified
scenes at theatres in a vain protest against the cruelty of
dragging terrified and bewildered animals to the foot-
lights for the delectation of the crowd, 5 ) This almost
masculine aggressiveness is quite admirable when you
consider the author’s natural timidity, how nervous she
is in aeroplanes. (‘It is with the greatest difficulty that I
refrain from asking the pilot if he is sure about the tail.
Is it on? Is it on straight ? What will happen if it falls
off? 5 ) and how on one occasion, climbing a pyramid, she
very nearly had what she calls a ‘swooning sickness 5 .

But what engaging company on these foreign cruises
and excursions a maiden lady of her kind must have been,
exhilarated as she was by her freedom from parish activi-
ties. (‘All that matters is that we are alone and free, free .
Nobody can telephone to us. Nobody can ask us to lecture
on the Victorian novelists. It is beyond the realms of
possibility that anybody, for at least twenty-four hours,
will ask us to open a chrysanthemum exhibition 5 ), and
hilarious with the unaccustomed wine (‘We are, beyond
a shadow of doubt. Abroad. And not only Abroad. At

421

SOME CHARACTERS

Large. And not only at Large but in a delirious haze of
irresponsibility, and white wine 5 ). Her emotions are so
revealing: she weeps, literally weeps, over Athens. She
disapproves of women who don’t grow old gracefully (‘I
also thought how very much nicer and younger the aver-
age woman of forty-five would look, in this simple
uniform, than in the stolen garments of her daughter 5 ),
she feels tenderly towards young people (‘The silvery
treble of youth that is sweeter because it is sexless 5 ), her
literary preferences are quite beautifully commonplace:
‘What a grand play Galsworthy would have written
round the theme of Naboth’s Vineyard . 5 Excitable,
sound at heart, genuinely attached to her brother and the
vicarage. ‘The old dear , 5 one exclaims with real affection,
and I was overjoyed that she got safely home to her own
garden before — but I mustn’t spoil her closing para-
graphs:

‘There they were, dancing under the elm, exactly as I
had planned them.

T was in time for the daffodils . 5

1936

422

FILM LUNCH

e I f ever there was a Christ-like man in human form it was
Marcus Lowe.’

Under the huge Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes,
the massed chandeliers of the Savoy, the little level
voice softly intones. It is Mr Louis B. Mayer, head of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the lunch is being held to
celebrate the American company’s decision to produce
films in this country. Money, one can’t help seeing it
written on the literary faces, money for Jam; but Mr
Mayer’s words fall on the mercenary gathering with
apostolic seriousness.

At the high table Sir Hugh Walpole leans back, a great
bald forehead, a rather softened and popular Henry
James, like a bishop before the laying-on of hands — but
oddly with a long cigar. Miss Maureen O’Sullivan waits
under her halo hat . . . and Mr Robert Taylor — is there,
one wonders, a woman underneath the table ? Certainly
there are few sitting anywhere else; not many, at any
rate, whom you would recognize as women among the
tough massed faces of the film-reviewers. As the voice
drones remorselessly on, these escape at intervals to
catch early editions, bulging with shorthand (Mr Mayer’s
voice lifts : ‘ I must be honest to myself if I’m to be honest
to you ... a 200,000,000-dollar corporation like the Rock
of Gibraltar . . . untimely death . . . tragedy’); they stoop
low, slipping between the tables, like soldiers making
their way down the communication trenches to the rest-
billets in the rear, while a voice mourns for Thalberg,
untimely slain. The bright Very lights of Mr Mayer’s
eloquence soar up: ‘Thank God, I say to you, that it’s
the greatest year of net results and that’s because I have
men like Eddy Sankatz’ (can that have been, the name ?

423

SOME CHARACTERS

It sounded like it after the Chablis Superiors 1929, the
Chateau Pontet Canet (Pauillac), 1933, G. H. Mumm,
Cordon Rouge, 1928, and the Gautier Freres Fine
Champagne 20 arts ).

"No one falls in the service of M.G.M. but I hope and
pray that someone else will take his place and carry on
the battle. Man proposes and God in his time disposes.

. . All the speakers have been confined to five minutes
— ‘Mr Alexander Korda, Lord Sempill, Lord Lee of
Fareham, and the rest, but of course that doesn’t apply
to the big shot. The rather small eyes of Mr Frank Swin-
nerton seem to be watching something on his beard, Mr
Ivor Novello has his hand laid across his stomach — or is
it his heart ?

One can’t help missing things, and when the mind
comes back to the small dapper men under the massed
banners Mr Mayer is talking about his family, and God
again. "I’ve got another daughter and I hope to god . . .’
But the hope fumes out of sight in the cigar smoke of the
key-men. "She thought she’d like a poet or a painter, but
I held on until I landed Selznick. ""No, Ireen,” I’d say,
""I’m watching and waiting.” So David Selznick, he’s
performing independent now.’

The waiters stand at attention by the great glass doors.
The air is full of aphorisms. " I love to give flowers to the
living before they pass on We must have entertain-

ment like the flowers need sunshine. ... A Boston bull-
dog hangs on till death. Like Jimmy Squires.’ (Jimmy
Squires means something to these tough men. They
applaud wildly. The magic name is repeated — "Jimmy
Squires ’.) " I understand Britishers,’ Mr Mayer continues,
"I understand what’s required of a man they respect and
get under their hearts.’

424

FILM LUNCH

There is more than a religious element in this odd,
smoky, and spirituous gathering; at moments it is rather
like a boxing match. ‘Miss O’Sullivan’ — and Miss
O’Sullivan bobs up to her feet and down again: a brown
hat: a flower: one misses the rest. ‘Robert Taylor’ — and
the world’s darling is on his feet, not far from Sir Hugh
Walpole, beyond the brandy glasses and Ivor Novello, a
black triangle of hair, a modest smile.

‘He comes of a lovely family,’ Mr Mayer says. ‘If ever
there was an American young man who could logically
by culture and breeding be called a Britisher it’s Robert
Taylor.’

But already we are off and away, Robert Taylor
abandoned to the flashlight men. It’s exactly 3.30 and Mr
Mayer is working up for his peroration: ‘It’s midday.
It’s getting late. I shall pray silently that I shall be guided
in the right channels. ... I want to say what’s in my
heart. ... In all these years of production, callous of
adulation and praise ... I hope the Lord will be kind to
you. We are sending over a lovely cast.’

He has spoken for forty minutes : for forty minutes we
have listened with fascination to the voice of American
capital itself: a touch of religion, a touch of the family,
the mixture goes smoothly down. Let the literary men
sneer . . . the whip cracks . . . past the glass doors and the
sentries, past the ashen-blonde sitting in the lounge out
of earshot (only the word ‘God’ reached her ears three

times), the great muted chromium studios wait

the novelist’s Irish sweep: money for no thought, for
the banal situation and the inhuman romance: money
for forgetting how people live: money for ‘Siddown,
won’t yer’ and ‘I love, I love, I love’ endlessly repeated.
Inside the voice goes on — ‘God ... I pray ’ and the

425

SOME CHARACTERS

writers* a little stuffed and a little boozed* lean back and
dream of the hundred pounds a week — and all that’s
asked in return the dried imagination and the dead
pen.

1937

426

THE UNKNOWN WAR

There are legendary figures in this war* of whom most
of us know nothing. Secretly, week by week, they fight
against the evil things: against Vultz, the mad German
inventor, against Poyner, preparing to unleash plague-
stricken rats on India, and the sneering sarcastic Group-
Captain Jarvis, who was really Agent 17 at Air Base B.
Billy the Penman; Nick Ward, heroic son of a heroic
father; Steelfinger Stark, the greatest lock expert in the
world, who broke open the headquarters of the German
Command in Norway; Worrals of the WAAFs; Flight-
lieutenant Falconer, with a price of 20,000 marks on his
head, 'framed’ as a spy; Captain Zoom, the Bird Man of
the RAF — these are the heroes (and heroines) of the
unknown war. This can never at any time have been a
'phoney’ war: from the word go, these famous indi-
viduals were on the job.

It is not surprising in some of these cases that we know
little or nothing about it: even his fellow schoolboys are
still unaware of the identity of Billy Baker. His biography
records one occasion when he was rebuked in class for an
untidy piece of dictation. 'The Headmaster would have
got a shock if he had known he was scolding the boy who
was known as "Billy the Penman”, the hand-writing
genius of the British Secret Service. That was a secret
shared by few people indeed.’ (It was a fine piece of
work which enabled Billy the Penman to substitute 500
'lines ’ — ' I must do my best handwriting ’ — for the details
of a new anti-aircraft gun before the Nazi plane swooped
down to hook the package from a clothes-line.)

On the other hand only the extreme discretion of his
school-fellows can have prevented news of Nick Ward’s
* Written in 1940
427

SOME CHARACTERS

activities reaching the general ear. Nick Ward, because of
a certain birthmark on his body, is considered sacred by
Indian hillmen, and periodically he visits the Temple of
Snakes in the Himalayas to gather information of Nazi
intrigues. (To Ward we owe it that a plot to enable
German bombers to cut off Northern India failed.)
Unfortunately on one of these journeys he was spotted
by enemy agents . 4 It was because he had been recognized
and because the Headmaster wished to protect him that
all the boys at Sohan College had been ordered to wear
hoods over their heads. It had thus become impossible
for the Nazi agents to pick out Nick from the others.
Later, Nick discovered that the local Nazi leader was Dr
Poyner, the school medical officer . 5 Only a school medical
officer was capable of conceiving the dastardly stratagem
that nearly betrayed Ward into enemy hands. Hillmen
crept up to the dormitory with pegs on their noses and
blew sneezing powder into the room, so that the boys
were forced to take off their hoods. (The pegs on their
noses prevented the Indians being affected.)

Perhaps the spirit of these heroes is best exemplified
by a heroine — Worrals, who shot down the mysterious
‘twin-engined high-wing monoplane with tapered wings,
painted grey, with no markings 5 in area 21-C-2. Her real
name is Pilot -Officer Joan Worralson, WAAF, and we
hear of her first as she sat moody and bored on an empty
oil drum, complaining of the monotony of life. ‘The fact
is, Frecks, there is a limit to the number of times one can
take up a light plane and fly it to the same place without
getting bored . . / Boredom is never allowed to become
a serious danger to these lone wolves : one cannot picture
any of them ensconced in a Maginot line.

But the man who inspires one with the greatest

428

THE UNKNOWN WAR

admiration is Captain Zoom, the lone flyer who beats
away on his individualistic flights borne up on long
black condor wings, with a small dynamo ticking on his
breast. Even his mad enemy Vultz could not withhold
admiration. c For a pig-dog of a Briton, he must have
brains! This is a good invention. By the time I have
improved it, it will be fit to use. Ja! 3 Vultz, it should be
explained, was engaged in building a tunnel from Guern-
sey to Britain. 4 The Nazis, since their occupation of the
Channel Islands, had thought out a new scheme for
invading Britain. They were tunnelling from Guernsey
to Cornwall using an entirely new type of boring-machine
invented by a brilliant engineer named Vultz. This
machine made tunnelling almost as quick as walking.
Vultz, a fiend in human form, had a fixed hatred of RAF
men, and for this reason employed them as slaves in
the tunnel. 3 No wonder Nick Ward on another occa-
sion exclaimed that c the Nazis stopped at nothing.
They did not mind how foul were the tricks they
tried or how helpless victims died. 3 Listen to Vultz
himself:

4 44 It is here we must finish our tunnel, 33 he croaked.
44 Portland Bill is the place. I don’t care what the High
Command says. If they want me to help them they must
listen to me. It is the shortest distance across the Channel
from here. 33

“Ja, that is right, Herr Vultz, but they say — 33 began
a red-faced colonel.

4 44 Bah, I will hear no more of it, 33 screeched the great-
est engineer in Germany. 44 1 don 3 t care what they say.
You can tell them I will build my tunnel to Portland Bill
or nowhere. It will be finished one week from today — if

429

SOME CHARACTERS

only they send me some more prisoners of war to work
for me.”

‘The second man spoke up.

6 We have hundreds of thousands of prisoners of all
kinds, British, French, and Polish. We can send you
thousands of them, but you demand RAF men. Not
enough RAF men are being captured to supply you, Herr
Vultz. Why will you not use someone else?”

‘The face of the mad engineer became twisted like that
of a demon. He thumped the table.

‘ “ Because my boring-machine kills those who work in
it. It shakes them to pieces. I have reason to hate them.
I will have RAF men or none. If they cannot capture
enough, they must do so in some other way. I want five
hundred RAF men.” 5

In fact, Vultz lost even the men he had: they were
rescued by Zoom, and the Guernsey tunnelling camp
was pounded to pieces by the RAF. ‘The Birdman had
succeeded in his biggest job, the saving of Britain.’

But Vultz, one assumes, escaped. None of the leaders
in this war ever dies, on either side. There are impossible
escapes, impossible rescues, but one impossibility never
happens — neither good nor evil is ever finally beaten.
The war goes on; Vultz changes his ground — perhaps in
happier days he may become again only a Pirate snigger-
ing as his lesser victims walk the plank: Falconer, the air
ace, is condemned to the firing squad, but the bullets have
not been moulded that will finish his career. We are all of
us seeing a bit of death these days, but we shall not see
their deaths. They will go on living week after week in the
pages of the Rover , the Skipper , the Hotspur , the
and the Girl's Own Paper ; in the brain of the boy who

430

THE UNKNOWN WAR

brings the parcels, of the evacuee child scowling from the
railway compartment on his way to ignominious safety, of
the shelter nuisance of whom we say: ‘How can anyone
live with a child like that ? 3 The answer, of course, is that
he doesn’t, except at meal-times, live with us. He has
other companions: he is part of a war that will never
come to an end.

1940

43i

GREAT DOG OF WEIMAR

My title is not, I must explain at once, a disrespectful
reference to the great German poet, but to another in-
habitant of Weimar, equally interesting but less well
known. Perhaps I should have heard long ago of the
unbearable Kurwenal, the companion (it would be
inaccurate and flippant to call him the pet) of Mathilde,
Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, but if I had not
opened by chance a little book called When Your Animal
Dies , written by Miss Sylvia Barbanell and recently pub-
lished by the Psychic Press, I should have remained in ig-
norance that dogs had ever spoken — not only Kurwenal,
the dachshund of Weimar, but Lola Kindermann, the
airedale, and her father Rolph Meokel, of Mannheim. I
have always suspected dogs : solid, well-meaning, reliable,
they seem to possess all the least attractive human virtues.
What bores, I have sometimes thought, if they could
speak, and now my most appalling conjectures have been
confirmed.

Miss BarbanelTs is — let me emphasize it — a serious
book: the unbearable Kurwenal could have no place in a
humorous one. He is here a minor character: Miss
Barbanell is mainly concerned with the after-life of
animals towards which she gently leads us by her stories
of animal intelligence — an after-life not only for the
unbearable Kurwenal and his kind but also for cats, pet
pigs, and goats. We hear of two pet frogs materializing,
and of Red Indian 4 guides 5 who answer evasively — in
language oddly unlike Fenimore Cooper's — embarras-
sing questions about bugs. (The lesser — undomesticated
— creatures, it appears, join a group soul : there is a group
soul for every species and sub-species, but nobody seems
worried at the thought of how the group bug grows every

432

GREAT DOG OF WEIMAR

time a Mexican crushes one with his toe: as for roast
chicken, in future it will seem to me like eating a theo-
sophist.)

But to return to the unbearable Kurwenal. Nobody
can question his claim to immortality, with his strong
moral sense, his rectitude, and his little clean clerical
jokes. Perhaps I should have explained that the Baroness
von Freytag-Loringhoven (with a name like that she must
have been a friend of Rilke) taught him to speak a lan-
guage of barks, and the appalling dog was only too ready
to learn. Five hundred investigators investigated him,
including Professor Max Muller, but he seems on the
whole to have endured them with exemplary patience.
Only once did he rebel, and that momentarily, against a
young neurologist of Berne University, exclaiming, C I
answer no doubters. Bother the asses.’ It is the only
recorded instance when this vile dog behaved other than
well; there is no suggestion that he ever buried a bone,
and the imagination boggles with embarrassment at the
thought of the intimate scenes that must have taken place
between Kurwenal and the Baroness when he was being
house-trained. He would have done nothing to make the
situation easier. "To me 5 , he was in the habit of saying
with priggish self-approval, "learning is a great happi-
ness 5 , and to a young scientist who visited him, he said,
"I like to have you here. You are more sincere than
most people . 5 He was that kind of dog: one pictures
the earnest melting brown gaze between the ears like
ringlets.

Dachshunds, of course, are always serious and usually
sentimental, but occasionally one has seen them shocked
into abandon by a fleshy bone, a good smell, or an amiable
tree. Not so the unbearable Kurwenal. Miss Barbanell

28 — C.E.G.G.

433

SOME CHARACTERS

writes that he had an ‘attractive personality and grand
sense of humour % but those words one uses of a dean
who does — sometimes — unbend. ‘Kurwenal had a
roguish sense of fun. The Baroness was given a very fine
Roman rug for him on his birthday. Kurwenal said, “I
find rug nice, will tear.” Then he paused before he added
with a sly look in his eye, “Not”/

If you accompanied Kurwenal on his walks you were
more likely to be edified than amused. He was fond of
discussing religion in a rather evangelical way. ‘On one
of these occasions he said to the Baroness, “ I often pray.”
She asked, “What do you pray for?” Kurwenal an-
swered, “For you.” J Once, during tea. Professor Max
Muller discussed with his hostess the slaughter of dogs
for food. ‘ He thought that the topic must be of particular
interest to Kurwenal and asked the dog whether he had
followed the conversation. “Yes,” replied Kurwenal. “Do
you wish to say something about it?” “Yes,” answered
the dog, and barked out the following: “The Christian
religion prohibits killing.” ’ Sometimes when I remem-
ber that all this was spoken in the German language I feel
sorry even for the unbearable Kurwenal : to think of those
constructions — that awful drift of guttural words — expres-
sed with a sort of slow pedantry in barks. For Conver-
sations with Kurwenal were quite as protracted as
Conversations with Eckermann. With the same neurolo-
gist from Berne who was the victim of KurwenaTs only
breach of good manners the dachshund carried on a
conversation lasting nearly an hour. One pictures him on
a hard ornate chair facing the scientist across a salon
table: I doubt if even the Baroness ever held Kurwenal
on her knees (it would hardly have been proper and it
certainly would not have been suitable). ‘When the

434

GREAT DOG OF WEIMAR

scientist was about to leave, he turned to the dachshund
and said, “I nearly forgot to ask you what you think
about a dog’s soul.” “It is eternal like the soul of a
man,” replied Kurwenal.’

Earnest, thoughtful, full of familiar quotations (he
knew his Hamlet\ his manner lightened very rarely by a
touch of diocesan humour, this dachshund possessed as
well the awful faculty of always saying — and doing — the
right thing. There was the message he sent with his
photograph to the Animal Defence Society in London :
there was the emotional scene with the military widower.

‘The Baroness tells how she was visited by a friend, an
army officer, who was very sad because his wife had
recently passed on. Kurwenal said to his owner, “We
must cheer him up.” The dog approached the downcast
man. “Do you want to say something to him ?” asked the
Baroness. “Yes,” replied Kurwenal.

4 “You can make up such nice little poems now,” she
said. “Make one for him.”

‘Without much delay Kurwenal recited:

I love no one as much as you .

Love me too .

I should like you with me every day.

Of happiness a ray .

‘Touched by the intelligent dog’s sympathy, the
depressed man’s spirits brightened considerably.’

Kurwenal, I am heartlessly glad to say, has ‘passed
on \ Otherwise he would probably have become a refugee,
for his Christian principles would never have allowed

435

SOME CHARACTERS

him to support the Nazi party; around Bloomsbury
therefore we should have heard continually his admoni-
tory barks, barks about the great Teutonic abstractions —
eternity, the soul, barks of advice, reproof, consolation.
Strangely enough there is no record in a book crammed
with seances, apparitions, invisible pawings, of the great
dog’s return. Silence has taken him at last, but I for one
feel no doubt at all that somewhere he awaits his mistress
— no, that is not a word one can use in connexion with
Kurwenal and the Baroness — his former companion,
ready to lead the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven
firmly among the group souls and the Red Indian
4 guides 5 , among the odd frequenters of the Kluski
seances — the buzzard, the Eastern sage and his weasel,
the Afghan with his maneless lion — into the heart of the
vague theosophic eternity.

1940

436

THE BRITISH PIG

The pig in our literature has always been credited with
qualities peculiarly British. Honest, a little stupid, com-
mercially-minded perhaps, but with a trace of idealism in
his love affairs, the pig’s best nature is shown in domestic
surroundings at a period of peace and material comfort.
‘They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was
bacon’. Miss Potter has written of Miss Dorcas and Miss
Porcas, but the sentence might stand as the epitaph of the
whole race. In the latest variant on the tale of the Three
Little PigSy published by the Walt Disney Studios, one
notices that same serenity in the portraits of the older
generation hanging in the house of the provident pig:
‘Mother’, an old-fashioned parent drawn tenderly in the
act of suckling eight children ; ‘ Uncle Otto changed to a
Rugby football, but a football at rest, unprofaned as yet by
the clamorous, vulgar game; ‘Father’, uncarved, sporting
his paper frill with the heavy dignity of a Victorian parent
in a Gladstone collar. It is impossible to doubt this strong
domestic affection when we find it noticed by an earlier
and less sympathetic observer than Miss Potter. The
Rev. W. Bingley, using the very terms in which foreign
historians have so often described Englishmen, wrote,
‘Selfish, indocile and rapacious, as many think him, no
animal has greater sympathy for those of his own kind
than the hog.’

But perhaps the British quality of the pig has never
been more thoroughly expressed than in the early poem :
‘ This little pig went to market (one remembers the pride
with which Englishmen have always repeated Napoleon’s
jeer); This little pig stayed at home (‘O sweet content!
O sweet, O sweet content !’ ; ‘ Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet
Well-Content’; ‘I love thee for a heart that’s kind — Not

437

SOME CHARACTERS

for the knowledge in thy mind’ — it is sometimes hard to
remember that Dekker and Mr Davies are writing of men
and not of pigs) ; This little pig had roast beef (no need to
emphasize the parallel); This little pig had none; This
little pig cried wee wee wee all the way home.’ Perhaps
no pig was more British than this last; a literary pig, for
the mother-fixation, the longing for the womb has been
the peculiar peril of our minor poets. fi O mother quiet,
breasts of peace’: Rupert Brooke is the obvious modem
example, but all through the Georgian period one
is aware of the patter of little hoofs along the dark road
that leads back to the country stye, the roses round
the door, the Mothering Sunday that goes on and on.

Sexual references, it will be noticed, are quite absent
from this early poem, as they are from the rather cruel,
politically-conscious story of the Three Little Pigs . It
really seems that at this period of pig literature the bigger
the litter the greater the inhibition, a situation closely
paralleled in Victorian England. Miss Potter, I think, was
the first to throw any real light on the Love Life of
the Pig, and this she did with a delicacy and a psycho-
logical insight that recall Miss Austen. She drew for
the first time in literature the feminine pig. Hither-
to a pig had been just a pig; one usually assumed
the sex to be masculine. But in Pig-Wig, whom
Pigling Bland, it will be remembered, rescued from the
cottage of the fatal Mr Peter Thomas Piperson, the
female pig was revealed to be as completely British as
the male: inquisitive, unromantic, demanding to be
amused, fond of confectionery and admirably unself-
conscious:

‘ She asked so many questions that it became embarras-
sing to Pigling Bland.

438

THE BRITISH PIG

He was obliged to shut his eyes and pretend to sleep.
She became quiet, and there was a smell of pepper-
mint.

“ I thought you had eaten them ? ” said Pigling, waking
suddenly.

“Only the comers/ 5 replied Pig-Wig, studying the
sentiments (they were conversation peppermints) by the
firelight.

“I wish you wouldn’t; he might smell them through
the ceiling,” said the alarmed Pigling.

Pig-Wig put back the sticky peppermints into her
pocket. “Sing something,” she demanded.

“Iam sorry ... I have toothache,” said Pigling much
dismayed.

“Then I will sing,” replied Pig-Wig. “You will not
mind if I say iddy tidditty ? I have forgotten some of the
words.” ’

It is impossible to deny that this is a peculiarly English
love scene; no other nation, except perhaps the Russian,
would have behaved or written quite like this, and the
sentiment of the ending, the luxurious indulgence in
wistfulness and idealism: ‘They ran, and they ran, and
they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level
green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes.
They came to the river, they came to the bridge — they
crossed it hand in hand’ would be inconceivable to a race
of pigs whose prosperity had been more precarious, to
whom the struggle for existence had been more crudely
presented. American pigs, for example, who meet their
end, like so many other Americans, abruptly in Chicago,
would have been at the same time more brutal and more
soft-hearted

439

SOME CHARACTERS

Both these rather contradictory qualities appear in the
Walt Disney Studios’ brilliant adaptation of Three Little
Pigs (and I should like, before I forget in the fascination
of the story, warmly to congratulate all those concerned
in the production of this book: the chief electrician,
the cameraman, the fashion designer, the art editor, the
scenario writer, the director and assistant director, the
producer, the author and the composer of the theme
song). These pigs are no longer quite so British, which is
to say that they are no longer quite so piggish. The curled
tails, the improvident fiutings, the house of straw and the
house of twigs and the house of brick have never been
more tenderly portrayed, but the wolf never more
brutally. This is the wolf of experience, not of dream;
Wall Street smashes, financiers’ suicides, the machine
guns of the gangster are behind this wolf. Watch him out-
side the house of twigs, sitting in a basket, a sheepskin
falling on either side of his ferocious muzzle like the wig
of a Jeffreys : this is Justice conniving at unjust executions
and letting the gangster free. And watch him again out-
side the house of bricks in a rusty hat, in an overcoat, in a
false yellow beard: T’m the Kleen-e-ze Brush man, I’m
giving away free samples’: he is every share pusher
personified, the man who knows of a new gold mine, a
swell oil field.

But just because the whole story is more realistic than
the English version, the American mind shrinks from the
ruthless logical denouement. The two improvident pigs
are not swallowed by the wolf, they escape and take
refuge with their brother in the brick house, and even the
wolf escapes with a scalding. The wolf’s escape, indeed, is
the most American aspect of this transplanted tale. How
often one has watched the methods of justice satirized

440

THE BRITISH PIG

upon the screen with a realism that would be impossible
in England; yet nothing is done about it, the wolf
escapes. The English story is the bettor one, to sacrifice
two pigs that the third may live in safety, to sacrifice the
improvident pigs that the provident pig may be remem-
bered for ever in his famous aphorism: 4 The price of
liberty is eternal vigilance. 5

1934

441

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHERS

A sunk railway track and a gin distillery flank the gritty
street. There is something Victorian about the whole place
— an air of ugly commercial endeavour mixed with odd
idealisms and philanthropies. It isn’t only the jumble of
unattractive titles on the dusty spines, the huge weight of
morality at sixpence a time; even the setting has an
earnestness . . . The public-houses are like a lesson in
temperance.

It isn’t all books by any means in the book market: a
dumb man presides over the first stall given up to paint-
brushes and dividers ; we pass wireless parts, rubber heels,
old stony collections of nuts and bolts, gramophone
records, cycle tyres, spectacles (hospital prescriptions
made up on the spot under the shadow of the gin
distillery), a case of broken (I was going to say moth-
eaten) butterflies — privet-hawks and orange-tips and
red admirals losing their antennae and powder, shabby
like second-hand clothes. One stall doesn’t display its
wares at all: only labels advertising Smell Bombs, Itching
Powder, Cigarette Bangs — Victorian, too, the painful
physical humour reminding us of Cruickshank on the
poor and Gilbert on old age.

And then at last the books. It is a mistake to look for
bargains here, or even to hope to find any books you
really want — unless you happen to want Thackeray,
Froude, or Macaulay on the cheap. Those authors are
ubiquitous. No, the book market is the place for picking
up odd useless information. Here, for instance, is Dib-
din’s Purification of Sewage and Water , published by the
Sanitary Publishing Company, next to Spiritual Counsel
for District Visitors , Submarine Cables > and Chicago Police

442

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHERS

Problems , published — it seems broadminded — by the
Chicago University Press. Of course, there are lots of
folios called View of the Lakes or of Italy, Switzerland,
the Tyrol, as the case may be; and one can buy, in pale-
blue paper parts, Bessemer on Working Blast Furnaces .
Doll Caudel in Paris seems to be part of a series and looks
a little coarse.

Somebody had left a book open on a stall, and I read
with some amazement: ‘ George Moore had a great idea
of duty . 4 If I hav<j one thing , 5 he says in his diary, ‘it is an
imperative sense of duty . 5 He was always possessed with
the full sense of ‘ doing his duty . 5 He wished to do it ; and
he prayed to God to help him do it. But what duty ? 5
What, indeed ? Of course, one remembers the scene in
Salve, when Moore said a prayer with Mr Mahaffy and
was presented with a prayer-book, but this emphasis on
duty seemed a little odd until I found the title-page and
the author — Samuel Smiles, LL.D. This George Moore
was not a writer, but a wholesale merchant and a philan-
thropist, and here, perhaps, is the real delight of the book
market — nowhere else would one be likely to find the
life of a Victorian draper. And it is rewarding. Smiles
deserved his popularity; there is a bold impressionist
vitality about his style; he roughs in very well the atmos-
phere of commercial travelling: the astute offer of a
favourite snuff, the calculated jest, the encounters in
hotel rooms — the Union Hotel, Birmingham, and the
Star at Manchester, the seedy atmosphere of benevolence,
what he calls ‘Mr Moore’s labours of love 5 : the hospital
for incurables, the penny bank, the London Porters 5
Benevolent Association, the Kensington Auxiliary Bible
Society, the Pure Literature Society (Mr Moore’s favour-
ite book, unlike his namesake’s, was The Memoirs and

443

SOME CHARACTERS

Remains of Dr M'Cheyne). His oddest philanthropy per-
haps was ‘in marrying people who were not, but who
ought to have been, married’ — or else his attempt to
introduce copies of the Bible into the best Paris hotels.
But Dr Smiles had more than vigour; he had a macabre
if ungrammatical imagination, as when he describes the
end of the first Mrs Moore. ‘Her remains were conveyed
to Cumberland. On arrival at Carlisle, Mr Moore slept
in the Station Hotel. It seemed strange to him that while
in his comfortable bed, his dead wife should be laying
cold in the railway truck outside, within sight of the hotel
windows.’

Macabre — but not quite so macabre as this other book
which had lost half its title-page, but seems to be called
The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death. Published in 1746,
and illustrated with some grim little copper-plates, it con-
tains ‘a great variety of amusing and well-attested In-
stances of Persons who have return’d to Life in their
Coffins, in their Graves, under the Hands of the Surgeons,
and after they had remain’d apparently dead for a con-
siderable Time in the Water’. A scholarly little work,
which throws some doubts upon the story that Duns
Scotus ‘bit his own Hands in his Grave’, it carries in the
musty pages some of the atmosphere of an M. R. James
story — there is an anecdote from Basingstoke too horrible
to set down here which might have pleased the author of
O Whistle and Til Come to You . I was pleased to find a
few more details of Ann Green, who was executed at
Oxford in 1650 and was revived by her friends — about
whose resurrection, it may be remembered, Anthony
Wood wrote some rather bad verses — and before
laying the book back beside the battered brown tin
trunk which carried the salesman’s stock, I noted this

444

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHERS

recipe for reviving the apparently dead: ‘We ought to
irritate his Nostrils by introducing into them the Juice
of Onions, Garlick, and Horse-radish, or the feather’d
End of a Quill, or the Point of a Pencil: stimulate
his Organs of Touch with Whips and Nettles; and if
possible shock his Ears by hideous Shrieks and excessive
Noises.’

Poor human body which must be clung to at all costs.
There is very litde light relief in the book market — an old
copy of Three Men on the Hummel, that boisterous work,
all sobs and horseplay, and a promising folio out of my
reach called simply The Imperial Russian Dinner Service .
The smell of mortality, morality, and thrown-out book go
together — and the smell of the antiquated Metropolitan
Line. Here is another moralist. In Postkuma Christiana
(1712, price 6d.) William Crouch, the Quaker, laments
the Restoration — ‘The Roaring, Swearing, Drinking,
Revelling, Debauchery, and Extravagancy of that Time
I cannot forget,’ and a few lines, as I turned the pages,
caught the imagination as Blind Pew once did at the Ben-
bow Inn. He is quoting an account of the Quakers, thirty-
seven men and eighteen women, who were banished to
Jamaica. ‘The Ship was called The Black Eagle , and lay
at anchor in Bugby's Hole , the Master’s name was Fudge ,
by some called Lying Fudge' They lay in the Thames
seven weeks, and half of them died and were buried in
the marshes below Gravesend. ‘Twenty-seven survived,
and remained on board the Ship; and there was one
other Person of whom no certain Account could be
given.’

That is the kind of unexpected mystery left on one’s
hands by a morning in the book market. A storm was
coming up behind the gin distillery, and the man with the

445

SOME CHARACTERS

Itching Powder was packing up his labels — trade isn’t
good these days for his kind of bomb. It was time to
emerge again out of the macabre past into the atrocious
present.

1939

446

AT HOME

One gets used to anything: that is what one hears on
many lips these days,* though everybody, I suppose,
remembers the sense of shock he felt at the first bombed
house he saw, I think of one in Woburn Square neatly
sliced in half. With its sideways exposure it looked like a
Swiss chalet : there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in
the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one
leg over the abyss. The combination of music and skiing
made one think of the Sanger family and Constant
Nymphs dying pathetically of private sorrow to popular
applause. In the bathroom the geyser looked odd and
twisted seen from the wrong side, and the kitchen impos-
sibly crowded with furniture until one realized one had
been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the
stove and the dresser — all the space where people used
to move about with toast and tea-pots was out of sight.
But after quite a short time one ceased to look twice
at the intimate exposure of interior furnishings, and
waking on a cement floor among strangers, one no
longer thinks what an odd life this is. "One gets used to
anything . 5

But that, I think is not really the explanation. There
are things one never gets used to because they don’t con-
nect: sanctity and fidelity and the courage of human
beings abandoned to free will: virtues like these belong
with old college buildings and cathedrals, relics of a world
with faith. Violence comes to us more easily because it
was so long expected — not only by the political sense but
by the moral sense. The world we lived in could not have
ended any other way. The curious waste lands one some-
times saw from trains — the crated ground round Wolver-

* October 1940.

447

SOME CHARACTERS

hampton under a cindery sky with a few cottages grouped
like stones among the rubbish: those acres of abandoned
cars round Slough : the dingy fortune-teller's on the first-
floor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back
street: they all demanded violence, like the rooms in a
dream where one knows that something will presently
happen — a door fly open or a window-catch give and let
the end in.

I think it was a sense of impatience because the violence
was delayed — rather than a masochistic enjoyment of
discomfort — that made many writers of recent years go
abroad to try to meet it half-way : some went to Spain and
others to China. Less ideological, perhaps less courageous,
writers chose corners where the violence was more moder-
ate; but the hint of it had to be there to satisfy that moral
craving for the just and reasonable expression of human
nature left without belief. The craving wasn’t quite satis-
fied because we all bought two-way tickets. Like Henry
James hearing a good story at a dinner-table, we could
say, ‘Stop. That’s enough for our purpose’, and take a
train or a boat home. The moral sense was tickled: that
was all. One came home and wrote a book, leaving the
condemned behind in the back rooms of hotels where the
heating was permanently off or eking out a miserable
living in little tropical towns. We were sometimes — God
forgive us — amusing at their expense, even though we
guessed all the time that we should be joining them soon
for ever.

All the same — egotistical to the last — we can regard
those journeys as a useful rehearsal. Scraps of experience
remain with one under the pavement. Lying on one’s
stomach while a bomb whines across, one is aware of how
they join this life to the other, in the same way that a

448

AT HOME

favourite toy may help a child, by its secret appeal, to
adapt hims elf to a strange home. There are figures in our
lives which strike us as legendary even when they are
with us, seem to be preparing us like parents for the sort
of life ahead. I find myself remembering in my basement
black Colonel Davis, the dictator of Grand Bassa, whose
men, according to a British Consul’s report, had burned
women alive in native huts and skewered children on
their bayonets. He was a Scoutmaster and he talked
emotionally about his old mother and got rather drunk
on my whisky. He was bizarre and gullible and unac-
countable: his atmosphere was that of deep forest,
extreme poverty, and an injustice as wayward as genero-
sity. He connected like a poem with ordinary life (he was
other people’s ordinary life) : but it was ordinary life ex-
pressed with vividness. Then there was General Cedillo,
the dictator of San Luis Potosi (all my dictators, unlike
Sir Nevile Henderson’s, have been little ones). I remem-
ber the bull-browed Indian rebel driving round his farm
in the hills followed by his chief gunmen in another car,
making plans for crops which he never saw grow because
the federal troops hunted him down and finished him. He
was loved by his peasants, who served him without pay
and stole everything he owned, and hated by the towns-
people whom he robbed of water for his land (so that you
couldn’t even get a bath). His atmosphere was stupidity
and courage and kindliness and violence. Neither of
these men were of vintage growth, but they belonged to
the same diseased erratic world as the dictators and the
millionaires. They started things in a small way while the
world waited for the big event. I think of them sometimes
under the pavement almost with a feeling of tenderness.
They helped one to wait, and now they help one to feel at

29 — C.E.G.G.

449

SOME CHARACTERS

home. Everybody else in the shelter, I imagine, has
memories of this kind, too: or why should they accept
violence so happily, with so little surprise, impatience, or
resentment ? Perhaps a savage schoolmaster or the kind
of female guardian the young Kipling suffered from or
some beast in himself has prepared each man for this
life.

That, I think, is why one feels at home in London — or
in Liverpool or Bristol, or any of the bombed cities — be-
cause life there is what it ought to be. If a cracked cup is
put in boiling water it breaks, and an old dog-toothed
civilization is breaking now. The nightly routine of
sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable
engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are
you ? ’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving
away, hold one like a love-charm. We are not quite happy
when we take a few days off. There is something just a
little unsavoury about a safe area — as if a corpse were to
keep alive in some of its members, the fingers fumbling
or the tongue seeking to taste. So we go hurrying back
to our shelter, to the nightly uneasiness and then the c All
Clear’ sounding happily like New Year’s bells and the
first dawn look at the world to see what has gone: green
glass strewn on the pavement (all broken glass seems
green) and sometimes flames like a sticky coloured plate
from the Boy’s Own Paper lapping at the early sky. As for
the victims, if they have suffered pain it will be nearly
over by this time. Life has become just and poetic, and if
we believe this is the right end to the muddled thought,
the sentimentality and selfishness of generations, we can
also believe that justice doesn’t end there. The innocent
will be given their peace, and the unhappy will know
more happiness than they have ever dreamt about, and

450

AT HOME

poor muddled people will be given an answer they have
to accept. We needn’t feel pity for any of the innocent,
and as for the guilty we know in our hearts that they will
live just as long as we do and no longer.

1940

451

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

A ghost — a revenant — does not expect to be recognized
when he returns to the scenes of his past; if he communi-
cates to you a sense of fear, perhaps it is really his own
fear, not yours. Places have so changed since he was alive
that he has to find his way through a jungle of new houses
and altered rooms (concrete and steel can proliferate like
vegetation). Because he hasn’t changed, because his
memories are unaltered, the revenant believes that he is
invisible. Coming back to Freetown and Sierra Leone
last Christmas, I thought I belonged to a bizarre past
which no one else shared. It was a shock to be addressed
by my first name on my first night, to feel a hand squeeze
my arm and a voice say, * Scobie, eh, who’s Scobie ? 9 and
£ Pujehun, don’t you remember we met in Pujehun? I
was in PWD. Let’s have a drink at the City.’

I came to Sierra Leone to work more than a quarter of
a century ago, landing in Freetown from a slow convoy
four weeks out of Liverpool. I felt a strong sense of
unreality: how had this happened? A kitchen orchestra
of forks and frying-pans played me off the Elder Demps-
ter cargo ship into a motor launch where my temporary
host, the Secretary of Agriculture, awaited me, expecting
something less flippant. The red Anglican cathedral
looked down on my landing as it had done in 1935 when
I first visited Freetown. Nothing in the exhausted shabby
enchanted town of bougainvillaea and balconies, tin roofs
and funeral parlours, had changed, but I never imagined
on my first visit that one day I would arrive like this to
work, to be one of those tired men drinking pink gin at
the City bar as the sun set on the laterite.

The sense of unreality grew stronger every hour. A
passage by air had been arranged to Lagos where I was

455

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

to work for three months before returning, and I thought
it best to warn my host that he would be seeing me again.
‘What exacdy are you going to do here ?’ he asked, and
I was studiously vague, for no one had yet told me what
my ‘cover’ in this far from James Bond world was to be.
I knew my number, and that was all (it was not 007). I
was glad when a major with a large moustache looked in,
with an air of stem premeditation, for drinks, and the
subject could be changed. ‘Come for a walk?’ he sud-
denly asked. It seemed an odd thing to do at that hour of
the day, but I agreed. We set out down the road in the
haze of the harmattan.

‘Find it hot, I suppose ? ’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Humidity is 95 per cent.’

‘Really?’

He swerved sideways into a garden. ‘This house is
empty,’ he said. ‘Fellow’s gone on leave.’ I followed him
obediently. He sat down on a large rock and said, ‘Got a
message for you.’ I sat gingerly down beside him, remem-
bering the childhood warning that sitting on a stone in the
heat gives you piles.

‘ Signal came in last Friday. You’re an inspector of the
DOT. Got it?’

‘What’s DOT?’

‘Department of Overseas Trade,’ he said sharply.
Ignorance in this new intelligence world was like in-
competence.

All the same I felt relieved to know and at lunch
gently led the conversation back to my future in Free-
town. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said to my host, ‘I can tell
you, though it’s not been officially announced yet, that I
am to be an Inspector of the DOT.’

456

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

‘DOT ? 5

‘Department of Overseas Trade . 5

He looked a little sceptical. He had every right to be,
for by the time I returned I had become something quite
different. The DOT, I learnt too late in Lagos, had
refused to give cover to a phoney inspector, and an
equally unsuccessful attempt had been made on the
virginity of the British Council. After that I was threat-
ened in turn with a naval rank and an air force rank, until
it was found that unless I was given the rank of com-
mander or group-captain I could not have a private office
and a safe for my code-books. When I flew up to Free-
town again it was with a vague attachment to the police
force which was a little difficult to explain to those who
awaited an inspector of Overseas Trade.

The whole of my life in Freetown had the same un-
reality; for the secretariat I did not exist, for I was not on
the Colonial Office list where everyone’s salary and
position were set down, and for the Sierra Leonians I was
another unapproachable Government servant. I lived
alone in a small house on the edge of what in the rains
became a marsh, with a Nigerian transport camp oppo-
site me which helped to collect the vultures and behind
the scrub which collected flies, for it was used as a public
lavatory. Over this I had one successful brush with the
administration. When I wrote to the Colonial Secretary
demanding a lavatory for the Africans he replied that my
request should go through the proper channels by way of
the Commissioner of Police; I quoted in reply what
Churchill had said of ‘proper channels 5 in wartime, and
the shed was built. I wrote back that in the annals of
Freetown my name like Keats’s would be writ in water.
My isolation for a while was increased when I quarrelled

457

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

with my boss 1,200 miles away in Lagos and he ceased to
send me any money to live on (or to pay my almost non-
existent agents.)

During that long silence I had plenty of time to wonder
again why I was here. Our lives are formed in the years
of childhood, and when a while ago I began writing an
account of my first twenty-five years, I was curious to
discover any hints of what had led a middle-aged man to
sit there in a humid solitude, far from his family and his
friends and his real profession. Out of my experience was
to come my first popular success The Heart of the Matter ,
but I did not begin to write that book for another four
years, after the absurdities had already faded from my
mind. I had been instructed not to keep a diary for
security reasons, just as I was taught the use of secret inks
that I never employed and of bird-droppings if these
were exhausted. (Vultures were the most common bird
— there were usually three or four on my tin roof —
but I doubt whether their droppings had been contem-
plated.)

The start of my life as 59200 was not propitious. I
announced my safe arrival by means of a book code (I
had chosen a novel of T. F. Powys from which I could
detach sufficiently lubricious phrases for my own amuse-
ment), and a large safe came in the next convoy with a
leaflet of instructions and my codes. The code-books were
a constant source of interest, for the most unexpected
words occurred in their necessarily limited vocabulary.
I wondered how often use had been made of the symbol
for ‘eunuch 5 , and I was not content until I had found an
opportunity to use it myself in a message to my colleague
in Gambia: ‘As the chief eunuch said I cannot repeat
cannot come. 5 (Strange the amusements one finds in

458

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

solitude. I can remember standing for half an hour on the
staircase to my bedroom watching two flies make love.)

The safe was another matter. I am utterly incapable of
reading instructions of a technical nature. I chose my
combination and set it as I believed correctly, put away
my newly acquired code-books, shut the safe and tried in
vain to reopen it. Very soon I realized the fault I had
made : my eye had passed over one line in the instructions
and the combination was set now to some completely
unknown figure. Telegrams were waiting to be decoded
and telegrams to be sent. Laboriously with the help of
T. F. Powys I lied to London that the safe had been
damaged in transit; they must send another by the next
convoy. The code-books were rescued with a blow flame
and lodged temporarily in Government House.

I used to look forward to the evenings when I would
take a walk along the abandoned railway track on the
slopes below Hill Station, returning at sunset to get my
bath before the rats came in (at night they would swing
on my bedroom curtains). Then — free from telegrams —
I would sit down to write The Ministry of Fear. Whisky,
gin and beer were severely rationed, but some friendly
naval officers supplied me with demi-johns of wine which
had come from Portuguese Guinea without passing the
customs. On nights of full moon the starving pi-dogs
kept me awake with their howling, and I would rise, pull
boots over my pyjamas, and get rid of my rage by cursing
and throwing stones in the lane behind my house where
the very poor lived. My boy told me I was known there
as ‘the bad man 5 , so before I went away from Freetown
as I believed for ever, I sent some bottles of wine to a
wedding in one of the hovels, hoping to leave a better
memory behind.

459

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

It was not very often I went to the City Hotel, where
The Heart of the Matter began. There one escaped the
protocol-conscious members of the secretariat. It was
a home from home for men who had not encountered
success at any turn of the long road and who no longer
expected it. They were not beachcombers, for they had
jobs, but their jobs had no prestige value. They were
failures, but they knew more of Africa than the succes-
ses who were waiting to get transferred to a smarter
colony and were careful to take no risks with their
personal file. In the City bar were the men who had
stayed put into the beginnings of old age, and yet they
were immeasurably younger than the new assistant sec-
retaries. The dream which had brought them to Africa
was still alive: it didn’t depend on carefully mounting
the ladder of a career. I suppose I felt at home at the
City because, after six months or more, I was beginning
to feel a failure too.

All my brighter schemes had been firmly turned down :
the rescue by bogus Communist agents of a left-wing
agitator who was under house-arrest (I intended to have
him planted in Vichy-held Conakry believing himself to
be an informant for Russia) : a brothel to be opened in
Bissau for visitors from Senegal. The Portuguese liners
came in and out carrying their smuggled industrial
diamonds, and not one search — from the rice in the
holds to the cosmetics in the cabins — had ever turned up
a single stone. In the City bar I could occasionally forget
the insistent question what am I doing here ? because the
answer was probably much the same as my companions
might have given: an escape from school? a recurring
dream of adolescence ? a book read in childhood ?

The City Hotel I found on my return last Christmas

460

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

had not altered at all. A white man looked down from the
balcony where my character Wilson sat watching Scobie
pass in the street below, and he waved to me as if it was
but yesterday that I looked in last for a coaster. Only the
turbaned Sikh was absent who used to tell fortunes — in
the communal douche for the sake of privacy. A Sierra
Leonian played sad Christmas calypsos in a comer of the
balcony and a tart in a scarlet dress danced to attract
attention (tarts were not allowed inside). Even the
kindly sad Swiss landlord was still the same; he hadn’t
left Freetown in more than thirty years. He had survived,
and to that extent he was successful, but perhaps it was
the very meagreness of the success which made his
shabby bar the ‘home from home’.

Next day I went to look for my old house. A quarter of
a century ago it had been condemned by the health
authorities, so it might well have disappeared, and I
thought at first it had. A brand-new Italian garage stood
on the site of the Nigerian transport camp, the bush
where the lavatory had been built had disappeared under
a housing-estate, and there were very superior houses
now in the lane where the pi-dogs had howled (one was
occupied by the Secretary General of the National
Reform Council which at that moment was governing
Sierra Leone). It took me quite a while to recognize my
old home, brightly painted with a garden where the mud
had been. The little office had become a kitchen, the
sitting-room which had been bleak with PWD furniture
was gay with the abstract paintings of a Sierra Leone
young woman. I went upstairs and looked into the bed-
room where the rats had swung — there were still rats,
the owner said — and I stopped on the stairs where I had
watched for so long a fly’s copulation. The image brought

461

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

back the boredom of my adolescence, a youth playing at
Russian roulette . . . perhaps that had been a stage
towards this barren hermitage on the Brookfield flats.

The Brookfield church was unchanged, where my
friend Father Mackie used to preach in Creole: the same
bad statue of St Anthony over the altar, the same Virgin
in the butterfly blue robe. At Midnight Mass I could have
believed myself back in 1942 if in that year I had not
missed the Mass. A fellow Catholic, the representative of
the rival secret service, SOE, had come to dine with me
tete-a-tete and we were soon too drunk on Portuguese
wine to stagger to the church. Now the girl in front of me
wore one of the surrealist Manchester cotton dresses
which are rarely seen since Japanese trade moved in.
The word ‘soupsweet 5 was printed over her shoulder,
but I had to wait until she stood up before I could con-
firm another phrase: ‘Fenella lak’ good poke/ Father
Mackie would have been amused, I thought, and what
better description could there be of this poor lazy lovely
coloured country than £ soup sweet 5 ?

It was with some shame that my companion, Mario
Soldati, and I moved out of the old City Hotel for the
conventional comfort of the new luxury Paramount
built up the hill behind the former police station where
I used to come every day to collect my cables from the
Commissioner. The old man would not have approved
this change in Freetown, and I remembered the morning
in the rains when he went out of his mind under the
pressure of overwork, the strain of controlling corrupt
officers, the badgering of MI5 bureaucrats from home.
He was not a drinking man, but in his knowledge and
humanity he was more akin to the inhabitants of the City
Hotel than I was now. I had been spoilt for the communal

462

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

douche and the bare bedroom. They treated me with
great charity when I left, they gave me a warm welcome
whenever I returned for a drink, but I felt the guilt of a
beach-comber manque : I had failed at failure. How
could they tell that for a writer as much as for a priest
there is no such thing as success ?

1968